


Open Night and Day

by Metallic_Sweet



Series: Smooth the Descent (and Easy Is the Way) [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (when my devil rises), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Addiction, Falling In Love, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Hux, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Sleep Deprivation, Suicidal Thoughts, The Dark Side of the Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 20:53:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6129739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux drowns the sun in the void.</p><p>(Or, the story that occurred after <a href="">The Descent</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Night and Day

**Rey.**

There is a voice calling out across the universe.

 _Captain?_ it questions, confused and tentative but with an underlying command.

 _Phasma_ it calls, familiar and firm and strong.

 _Phasma!_ it roars, frustrated, frightened, and so, so afraid _Phasma where are you where are you don’t die please don’t not you ANSWER ME PLEASE_

And still louder, the voice screams. It is wordless, terrified, overflowing with such grief as to drive a former scavenger and her new master to their knees on a windy cliff a billion miles away. 

“Who are you?” Luke Skywalker howls, trying to help his new apprentice to her feet.

The screaming cuts out. Something tears. Makes them both stagger anew. There is a great abyss before them. A tremendous void. It threatens to swallow them whole.

 _no_

It’s the voice. It whispers, screams, begs: 

_no no don’t don’t come please don’t stay away far away no no no NO just let me DIE I’m ready DIE please please please Phasma please not you not you PLEASE NOT YOU_

It is a long time before the voice goes silent. Skywalker and Rey retreated into the stone. Into the least drafty cave to clutch hot drinks and try to warm themselves. That desperate, grieving scream: it was like drowning. Floating alone in space. 

They call into the Resistance base on Yavin 4. General Leia Organa has heard the call, too. Rey watches as Luke and her watch each other, a thousand things unsaid and unacknowledged. The call’s purpose is solved by Finn, who still on bed rest but awake. He is the only person who really knows who Phasma is.

“Was that Kylo Ren?” he asks, slow and puzzled, uncertain in these Force-type topics and because it’s clear he thinks that Kylo calling for Phasma would make little to no sense.

“No,” Skywalker says because he knows Ren, knows Ben, knows that Force presence so well. “It was someone else. Was there anyone else on you know of who was Force-sensitive?”

Finn shakes his head immediately. “Besides the other Knights of Ren, I’d never heard of that sort of thing until…”

He grimaces slightly. Shrugs and looks down at the sheets. On either side of his bed, Organa and Poe look withdrawn and worried. Skywalker blows out a long, heavy breath.

“So it’s someone else…”

Someone, Rey knows instinctively, who is extremely strong.

 

**Hux.**

When Brendol Hux II turned eighteen, he and his Academy roommate Cameron Rigger got a week’s vacation.

It was for Rigger’s eighteenth birthday, too, which was almost exactly fourteen Imperial hours after Hux’s. It’s how rooming assignments were arranged at the Academy. Candidates were divided first by sex and then sorted into rooms by birthdate. There were no rooming changes. It was, as everything at the Academy was designed to be, a test. Any issues were to be worked out between the individuals involved. The average starting class of several hundred officer cadets were whittled down by the final year to a stable mean of 47.38 candidates. It made sense. These exemplary children would form the upper echelon of the First Order. 

Thus, the eighteenth birthday was rewarded with a week’s vacation, allowing finishing candidates to experience life outside of the Academy. This was also a test. For those like Hux, who had been born and forged for the First Order since birth, vacation was an odd, unstructured, and therefore fairly frightening concept. For Rigger, whose father had been from a family with Imperial sympathies but was not entirely military, it was less frightening.

“How about we go to a resort world?” Rigger suggested when they got their vacation time slotted into their schedule. “I’ve been to a few. They’re lots of fun. Lots of wiggly-jiggly –”

“Never say that again,” Hux said immediately.

Rigger guffawed. “I knew you’d say that,” he said, reaching over and shoving Hux in the side of the head. “Then what do you want to do?”

They ended up going to Naboo. It was a First Order-controlled retreat, so it wasn’t so removed from what Hux knew as to scare him. Rigger had to help him pick out civilian clothes when they landed.

“You can’t go around wearing regulation blacks,” he’d pointed out, holding out a thick grey jumper that Hux would keep for well over a decade after. 

Naboo was beautiful. Hux had known that conceptually from photos and studies of the planet’s historical and contemporary political importance to the Empire and the First Order, but seeing it, so lush and full of bountiful waters, was completely different. No wonder he had struggled so deeply with aesthetics at the Academy. Hux had grown up in the walls first of his family’s organised stone estate and then within the Academy’s manicured, steel-grey grounds. Rigger had arranged for a cabin in the Lake Country. The smell of the grass, the feel of the wind, the sound of the gentle, untroubled water:

Hux was enraptured.

The first day was spent lying out in the grass. They ate the bag of strange sticky sweets they’d bought from town. The second day was spent out on the lake, racing each other and diving in the deeper ends to pull up stones and handfuls of weeds to attack each other with in play. The third day was spent in the forest, climbing rocks and trees. They encountered several Gungan fishers on the fourth day when they went back to the lake and ended up trading a bunch of the stones they’d pulled up for the largest fish that Hux had ever seen. 

“What’re you going to do with the stones?” Hux asked as the head of the fishing crew gutted and prepped the fish.

“They’re the perfect size and weight for nets,” the fisher explained, billed lips curling slightly in amusement when Hux’s expression gave away his continued lack of understanding. “You’re a flyboy, aren’t you?”

“He’s going to rule the galaxy,” Rigger interjected before yelping as Hux hit him in the back of the head with a rejected rock. 

“You could,” Rigger said, late that night as they lay on the carpet of the cabin, full of fried fish and more of the sticky sweets from town.

Hux smiled. Reached out and gripped Rigger’s wrist. It earned him a warm chuckle. A bubble of contentment. Of knowing.

_my friend_

Hux, in that sleepy, sated moment, knew he would never be happier in his life.

 

Hux has made a mistake.

Snoke’s planet is a cold, dim place far from the system’s sun. It has barely any gravity and an even thinner atmosphere. It is uninhabitable except for the thin strip that faces the sun. The _Finalizer_ had to be manually landed. Hux had had to mix navigators from all four bridge crews to create one that had manual landing experience. He stayed on the bridge himself. 

Not because he had manual landing experience but because Snoke was speaking directly into his head.

It hurt. Snoke’s presence in his mind was like a bludgeon. Not unlike Ren’s method of clubbing his way through interrogation and torture. Snoke guided Hux and the _Finalizer_ to land and, in the same moment, drove a carving knife through the content of Hux’s brain. He laughed at Hux’s most prominent, traitorous thought:

_this is like Ryloth where Rigger died_

Hux has not been stripped of his rank. He has, in fact, effectively been promoted. For Starkiller’s success, for his service to the Order, the Supreme Leader, the galaxy itself. Snoke issued the decree across all channels. There is no title above General, but Hux holds a place by authority and authorisation beyond any other besides Snoke now.

“Rise, my little emperor,” Snoke whispered, a scythe against Hux’s brain.

Once, Hux’s father dreamed of this. Architect and ruler, the purpose for which Hux was born and bred. With whatever creature served as his mother. Hux was that dream. That weapon. That tool.

He still is.

Hux, driven to his knees on the _Finalizer_ ’s bridge as Snoke tears through his head, wishes he was dead.

 

A routine emerges. 

Hux spends alpha shift on his ship, sorting out what repairs need to be done and what supplies need to be bought and received. He usually takes half of beta shift, clocking out at the four-hour mark. Gamma shift is spent on the surface of their strange, dim, dust ball of a planet where Snoke reigns supreme. He returns for delta and graveyard shift. Sometimes conscious. Sometimes not, in which case he is delivered by the silent, strange droids that are the only other things that populate Snoke’s vast palace. 

Kylo Ren is recovering in medical back on the _Finalizer_ with the rest of the survivors of Starkiller Base. He’s in a deep, unnatural asleep. He should have woken up a week ago, the medical team explained as Hux sat up on his own cot, supported by a pillow as a medical droid removed his IV line. It’s been inserted so frequently of late that it’s likely to scar.

“He’ll wake up eventually,” the surgeon, Captain Boris Meera said. “It’s probably just extra stress.”

Hux had nodded. It’s not true. Ren’s mind is not asleep. It’s awake in the Force, a turbulent and grief-stricken thing. Unable to escape his deeds even with a bantha’s dose of sedative in his blood.

 _please_ Hux whispers _don’t wake up_

They have been on the Snoke’s planet for twenty Imperial days. Hux has had as many audiences. In the throne room watched by silent droids, Hux sits before Snoke. The room has a very high ceiling, but they sit on the same level. Hux, lunatic and murderer. Snoke, all these things and more.

“You have an incredible connection to the Dark Side of the Force,” Snoke said the first time they met face to face.

“You were born brimming with potential,” Snoke said the second time.

“I will guide you,” Snoke promises the fourth time.

Hux looked at him. They sat across each other but close enough that their knees could touch if either of them happened to lean forward a bit. They did not touch. Hux does not speak voluntarily.

“You hate me,” Snoke said, the sixth time, flat, shapeless lips curling in what passed as a smile. “It is because you lack control.”

The universe screams, but Snoke’s palace is silent. It is only thousands of droids and Snoke, who is the first being to be wholly unreadable to Hux. There are no thoughts. No emotions. He is not quite a void because he is alive, but he is close.

Hux’s instincts, still imbedded in his being, tell him to _hide hide hide hide_

“You are strong,” Snoke says the eighth time as Hux huddles on the floor, hands pressed over his ears; he is crying with the pain of having Snoke crawling around his head. “If you were not, you would die from this.”

 _the weak quake before the strong_ his father used to think. Hux is quaking. He is weak. He always has been. He is just another tool. One with its uses, but those will run out eventually.

If Hux still had his own thoughts, his own emotions, anything besides the _Finalizer_ and its recovering crew, he would despair. Perhaps he already is. Hux’s thoughts are more muddled than they ever have been. He does not know if it is Snoke’s doing or if it is simply him. The free fall of his lunacy.

Hux wants to die.

He’s given up being allowed to control what happens to his body. He has not been able to hear Phasma since the collapse of Starkiller Base. She must still be alive, but he doesn’t know how or where. It would be better for her if he was dead. He does not want her anywhere near Snoke. It is certain that Snoke knows this. Hux has condemned her with his weak heart.

He would kill himself if not for the _Finalizer_ and his crew, who would be left stranded here on Snoke’s planet. He knows that Snoke has banked on this. Foreseen it. It makes Hux obey, returning again and again for training he desperately does not want. He staggers back to the ship to collapse. Sometimes he makes it to his quarters. Sometimes he does not. He wakes up in medical across from Ren, whose sleeping mind screams Hux awake. 

_don’t wake up_ is what Hux thinks at Ren every single time. _please spare yourself and die_

 

**Finn.**

General Organa and Poe are asking Finn questions. About the _Finalizer_. Starkiller Base. Finn knows that it is for the best. That this is what he’s chosen. But sometimes –

“What do you know about the General in charge?” Organa asks. “Brendol Hux. He has just been announced as the new ‘voice’ of the ‘Supreme Leader’.”

The whole concept is obviously strange and distasteful to Poe and Organa. Because Finn was brought up a stormtrooper, has only known what else there could be for a handful of weeks, the concept is neither strange nor distasteful. That General Hux has been chosen for such a trusted job: it seems logical.

The thought makes Finn grimace. He looks down. Runs his hands through his hair. It’s overgrown and getting thick, ends brushing the back of his neck and curves of his ears. It’s strange. He has never had anything more than a millimetre outside of the regulation stormtrooper cut.

“Not much,” he says, and it is the truth; he served almost exclusively in sanitation before all this happened. “About as much as I know about Kylo Ren.”

Which was apparently nothing at all. Organa’s lips thin as they always do when Ren comes up, but she nods. Presses on even as Poe’s eyes flicker back and forth in cautious discomfort. 

“Anything is helpful,” she says, and there’s a set to her shoulders, as if the galaxy could press down and find nothing to break. “Anything at all.”

Finn looks down at his lap. Breathes in. Breathes out. 

“He created the Starkiller Project himself,” Finn says, counting the threads in the sheets. “I didn’t really know what it was supposed to do or how it worked; each of us troopers are told only as much as we need to know to get our jobs done. I rarely saw him in person; he spent most of his time on the _Finalizer_ or in engineering. I know him mostly from project-wide announcements. He has a way with words; the prop is mandatory, of course, but it’s impossible not to listen to him. He and Captain Phasma –” 

Organa and Poe’s eyes flicker on that name. They’d all heard it. Someone screaming for the Captain in the Force. Finn had resented her. Unfairly, perhaps. He had been grieving and angry and scared. He had her shoved down a trash compactor. Starkiller Base is gone. Collapsed under its destabilised core. Someone very powerful is missing her. She might be dead.

Finn doesn’t like death. Doesn’t like being that person. They’d prized obedience above all else in the First Order. On the _Finalizer_ –

“They were close,” Finn says, and he feels suddenly like he’s skirting around the edge, the feeling of sparring without good footing. “I heard they served together on another ship, and the General—Hux, I mean—he brought her with him on the project. They usually acted as a united force against Kylo Ren. It was… They…” 

Finn stutters. Staggers. He cannot look up. He cannot look at Organa. He cannot bear whatever might be in her eyes.

Across from him, where he cannot look, she breathes in.

“Tell me.”

It is an order. Finn spent a lifetime following orders. It unsticks his tongue. It makes something he tries so hard to ignore that strange bloom in the back of his brain. It’s a _Finalizer_ stormtrooper thing. A special sort of camaraderie they’d all felt.

It made everything worth it so long as they were together. It had made losing each other so hard.

“Lord Ren,” he says, and he knows it’s the diction of FN-2187, but it’s easier for now, “was often violent. With the crew. Rank didn’t matter. That was why he and General Hux got into it pretty much every time they were on the _Finalizer_ or Starkiller for more than few days at the same time. You could tell when they’d had a fight because someone else would do the alpha shift prop for a while until the General got out of medical. Or until he released himself from medical. I don’t know. We weren’t told exactly that was what had happened, but...”

Finn curls his fingers into fists. Feels the sheets cut against his nails and his skin. Shuts his eyes.

“In the First Order,” he says, and it is his diction, words he’s always thought but FN-2187 would never have dreamed of saying aloud, “we prized obedience over all else. The _Finalizer_ and Starkiller Base were no different. We did not question. We did not act on our own. That is not how we were trained. Brought up.

“But,” and he allows himself to smile, a little, like he used to when there was a good joke and it was just him and his fellows on the delta sanitation shift. “There was this feeling sometimes. It was kind of like a superstition. It was like we were all connected. We’d all feel it. During graveyard shift, usually. It wasn’t about obedience then. It was a cold feeling, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not entirely.”

He opens his eyes. Looks up. On the holoscreen, Rey and Skywalker watch him. They look the same as Organa. Clear-eyed. Intense. It’s so far beyond how anyone ever looked at Finn in his life before. Poe’s eyes are the only ones that have a softness to them. Perhaps it is because he lacks the Force. Perhaps it is because he and Finn are the same. Poe reaches out and places his hands over Finn’s fists.

Finn swallows. Reaches deep. Breathes out.

“In that terrible place, it was the only thing that kept us going.”

 

**Hux.**

Hux has become withdrawn again. Like he once was in his Academy days but without hope that he will ever gain control over his heart or fate. His crew worry, although they know they cannot help if they want to someday leave the planet. Hux made that clear to them, not caring what they thought when he shouted it into their minds from medical. He has a deepening scar from the IV line he wakes up to under his collarbone. Ren is still asleep. Hux begs him to stay that way.

He’s run out of his pills. His weakness in the immediate aftermath of Starkiller’s collapse is not one that he will repeat; he will die before stealing from medical again. Snoke laughs at him, squeezing that thought out of his head. 

“You’re weak without it,” Snoke jeers.

It’s a pointless jest. Hux is a tool. He is only as useful so long as he is functional. Withdrawal is not an option. Instead, Hux is provided with a strange draught at the end of each meeting with Snoke. 

“A Sith remedy,” Snoke explains as he tips it down Hux’s throat the first time during their fourteenth meeting. 

It dulls the pain of his body. Helps knits what physical damage incurred in Snoke’s lesson back together. It does nothing to quiet Hux’s mind, which is what he actually needed the pills for. What he actually wanted. That was his mistake: to want something for himself. Snoke’s constant presence has stripped Hux of even that. He feels like a drain that the galaxy flows through.

So he has become withdrawn. He functions, like he did in his early days at the Academy, but he is older and has none of the misplaced hope and resilience of a child. The Sith remedy and medical put his body back together, but his mind is stretching, cracking, scattering. Snoke scratches at the edges of his senses at all times. Giving orders. Whispering promises. Pulling at the lunacy that has consumed Hux utterly and completely now. 

Hux begins to cry when he jerks awake in medical. Sometimes because of the pain of Snoke’s training, of the constant, serrating presence in his head. Sometimes because of the mounting stress like he once did when he was young and his father was dying. He’d grounded himself to Rigger then. But Rigger is dead and Phasma is missing, lost, and it is just Hux and a physically comatose and mentally grieving Ren.

 _Hux_ Ren whispers, more and more when they wake together, Ren in his thoughts, _I’m here_

 _please die_ Hux always says, responding as he never used to, never wanted to, but he can’t help it anymore.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to remember the difference between speaking with his tongue and with his thoughts. In the three months that have passed, all of Starkiller Base’s survivors and the _Finalizer_ ’s crew have become aware of what he is. Snoke has made sure of it. He’s stripping Hux of everything. Of his pills, his control, even his lunacy. 

“You are a gift,” Snoke murmurs as a droid drags Hux up from the floor, leaving a trail of blood and gore behind it. “The Dark Side incarnate.”

Hux does not care. 

“You will be my voice,” Snoke tells him, pulling him up from the floor by his hair. “Your abilities, your power: you were born for this role.”

Hux does not care. 

“You will obey,” Snoke whispers, drills into his head. “Or I will take everything you have ever called your own.”

Hux does not care. He does not. There is nothing that Hux cares about in the galaxy.

That is how Hux, dragged into medical for the umpteenth time, makes a realisation.

There is nothing that Snoke can steal from him. Hux was born as part of his father’s designs. He was a tool born to fight and die. He never owned anything in the first place. But Snoke:

Snoke owns things. He owns people. He owns Hux, Phasma, the _Finalizer_ , Ren and his knights, the First Order itself. He is powerful. An architect of the galaxy. 

Hux is just a tool. A powerful, useful tool. He hasn’t outgrown his usefulness yet. That is all. But Snoke thinks he has something to lose. Hux doesn’t. Not now. Rigger was stolen from him, a long time ago.

It is Snoke who has something to lose. It is Snoke who is responsible for all that has happened. He is the hand who designed the galaxy, the architect who manufactured the First Order. Hux’s career. Rigger’s career. He placed Hux on the _Minotaur_. He could have done the same with Rigger because Snoke knows all. But he didn’t. It was only Hux he wanted. 

Snoke can have him. Hux has been part of this design for too long to be anything more than its tool. He doesn’t care to change that. He can’t. 

_I’m here_ Ren whispers, weak but so very _here_ in Hux’s head.

Hux turns. Looks at Ren. Lain out on the neighbouring cot. IV running from under his collarbone. Slowly wasting away. But his mind –

_Ren?_

It is weak, but there’s a sensation of warmth. A reaching. Hux stares. 

Ren is Snoke’s dog. Snoke is Ren’s master. 

Hux feels something open. The void. But it is not as before. It’s different.

Ren presses. A questioning, searching feeling. It’s warm, pressing thing that fills Hux’s mind like never before. There is no warmth in Hux. It is something he shares with Snoke. And that is how Hux knows.

Ren is not his friend. He is not one of Hux’s mistakes. He is not Hux’s at all. He is full of that warmth that Hux has spent his life stealing glimpses of in others. That Rigger once gave freely. 

Hux reaches out. Across their beds. He curls his fingers around Ren’s wrist. 

_Ren_ Hux whispers, throwing himself forward to make sure Ren can hear, to try and block Snoke out

_I’m here, too_

This is something that Snoke can lose. 

 

A routine settles in.

Alpha shift is spent running the _Finalizer_ , watching over the repairs and the healing of his crew. Beta shift is spent on communication as the voice of Snoke to the political base of the First Order on Coruscant. Gamma shift is spent beaten and torn down on the floor of Snoke’s palace over and over. Delta and graveyard shift are spent in medical. Never unconscious. The void gaping.

He begins to talk to Ren. Something is physically wrong with him, but Hux can hear him. He knows that Hux is there. Ren tells him that constantly, and he listens as Hux begins to speak into the Force that he can no longer deny, not when Snoke drills it against his brain. It does not change the past. It does not change the present. There is a future, of course, but it is not for Hux.

 _you could_ Rigger’s memory whispers.

 _who is that?_ Ren asks.

They are in medical. Hux shifts. Snoke didn’t do anything to his legs this time, so he’s able to move from his cot to sit on the side of Ren’s. At first, this change in Hux’s behaviour had disturbed the medical team. Hux would not have allowed himself this before. Now, they do not blink. There is a lot that no longer disturbs them. There is a lot Hux allows. 

He reaches out. Takes Ren’s wrist. It’s warm. 

“I,” Hux says, aloud and into the Force, “had a friend.”

_your friend?_

“Yes,” Hux says, and it is loud and roaring; it is the first time he’s said it, even to himself. “We were cadets. At the Academy together.”

 _tell me?_ Ren asks, and it’s weak; a quiet wavering. 

“Yes,” Hux agrees; he tightens his hold on Ren’s wrist, on that warmth. “Yes.”

He tells Ren about the Academy where he didn’t really fit in, surrounded by so many loud minds, but excelled in every way that mattered. He tells Ren about his family, of his father who failed in his dream to rule, of his not-mother who he’s lost touch with. And he tells Ren about Rigger, who stole food constantly from the Academy kitchens and knew how to care, how to give, how to dream. 

“I didn’t put that dream there,” Hux realises, when he tells Ren of how Rigger thought Hux could rule the galaxy late in a graveyard shift after Snoke burned out his left eye. “He came to want that all on his own.”

 _you could_ Ren points out; his presence has grown slowly stronger over the past several weeks, warm and familiar against Hux’s mind. _I told you: you are so full of the Dark Side that it is blinding_

Hux swallows. Grips Ren’s wrist. The void, as always, widens.

He tells Ren a thousand things he never thought he would tell anyone. He recounts his early years of service on the _Minotaur_. About his times running amok in the field with Phasma, the two of them terrors with their blasters, Phasma’s physical prowess, and Hux’s blind ferocity. 

He tells Ren these things through his lunacy. Through the Force. Through his voice. It’s difficult for Hux to tell nowadays if he’s speaking aloud or not. It all sounds the same. The void is everywhere.

“It’s always been like this,” Hux says as Meera rebinds his shoulder, which Snoke yanked straight out of its socket when Hux failed again to produce lightning.

Meera blinks, cocking his head. “Are you speaking to me or to Lord Ren?” 

Hux shrugs his uninjured shoulder. It makes Meera smile a little, lips disappearing under his moustache. It’s not amusement. Rather, it’s a strange sort of sadness that isn’t pity. Hux stares at Meera for a long time until he’s done securing Hux’s shoulder.

“Right,” he says before stepping back and turning away.

He does not salute. He does not look back. He knows that here, in deep graveyard shift with only Hux, Ren, and the medical droids, there isn’t any point. 

Meera had originally been ship surgeon, but their head doctor, whom Hux understands now he’d done something to with extensive mental Force manipulation, had had to be returned to Coruscant after Starkiller Base’s collapse. In his new role and with Hux constantly in and out of medical, Meera had been uncomfortable at best. Now, it’s become part of the routine. Meera is a highly experienced surgeon, but his primary job for the past five months now has been to put Hux back together and shrug his shoulders over Ren, who still will not wake. 

“He should be losing more muscle mass,” Meera says as a medical droid removes Hux’s IV line; it’s on his right side because his left has begun to scar. “But he isn’t.”

“You shouldn’t be recovering,” Meera says at exactly six months since Starkiller’s collapse as a medical droid assists Hux in eating breakfast because his hands were burnt and are still wrapped in bacta. “Your body has nothing left.”

Like most members of the First Order, Meera doesn’t believe in the Force. He doesn’t believe in mysticism or any of the stories of what the Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader could do. What he does believe in is what he sees. Ren, who should have woken months ago and does not decay. Hux, who should have stopped waking up weeks ago and also does not decay. Meera’s discomfort is a palpable thing, mingled with fear. For himself and the rest of the crew. For Ren, if only because he fears what will happen when he wakes. For Hux, who Meera fears because he has become an unknown element.

Yet, there is also a sort of fondness. It isn’t just Meera that Hux feels this from. It’s from his crew and the stormtroopers who managed to get onto the _Finalizer_ before it made the jump into hyperspace to escape Starkiller Base. The repairs to the ship are almost complete, delayed as they were by the remoteness and secrecy of Snoke’s planet. Which each part that arrives and is installed, the crew’s morale, low in their fear and uncertainty, is bolstered. The grieving of all their losses doesn’t ease, of course. It never will.

Nell’s voice whispers, so very sad: _you can fight and die when you’re grown_

Little Bren had adored her so very much. He could have kept her, but he was too young to want such a complex thing. He was too foolish to realise he wanted to keep Rigger. If Hux has learned anything in these months as Snoke’s voice, it is that everyone has wants. If Hux has any wants anymore, it is to bolster his crew. To reassure them that they won’t trapped here. Hux has no desire to escape for he is a tool and he has learned to want too late. But his crew, his troopers, tarnished and grieving and afraid: they do not deserve this fate.

This is why he continues to give shipwide prop. It’s less propaganda now as simple updates on ship and repair status. There’s no point on prop for the _Finalizer_. He appears on holoscreen to make sure that they understand this isn’t General Brendol Hux II, the voice of Snoke, but the General who they served and built Starkiller Base under. Hux is Snoke’s tool, but they are Hux’s before Snoke’s. They have not outlived their usefulness. Hux must make sure that they understand this, even if it means exposing that he is damaged. 

For Snoke’s training has left its marks. There’s only so much rapid regeneration and bacta can do. Snoke generally stays away from Hux’s head, face, and upper neck, which are visible in his role as Snoke’s voice. The weight loss from rapid regeneration is no longer disguisable, nor the strange quality that Hux has noticed in his eyes. They’ve grown darker. Not haunted or dull, which they already were, but something else. Something that would be mad if Hux hadn’t already been.

“General,” Colonel Gerund Orovax says as they get lunch after alpha shift, “may I speak freely?”

Hux nods as he adds hot water to his dehydrated granola, citrus fruit, and the unavoidable and highly offensive protein portion. It bloats up into something resembling what it is supposed to be. He steps aside from the hot water dispenser. Orovax moves into place. Next to her, recently made Captain Terrence Fon holds his lunch tray. His face is unnaturally flat. They’re here together on purpose. 

“When repairs are completed,” Orovax says, very softly even though they are otherwise alone in the officer’s mess and whispering is pointless; Snoke hears all, “what can we expect for our orders?”

It is a good question. Hux waits for Fon to rehydrate his food. They move to the high table and sit although Fon is only a Captain. Hux did not maintain the rule of General and Colonels only at the high table as usually it was. Maybe it was the lax atmosphere of the _Minotaur_ under General Nanarat and then recreationally continued under General Faro, but Hux has at least shed that much of his Academy formality. Of his father’s arrogance.

Hux swallows a spoon of granola and fruit. Orovax and Fon tuck into their lunch. Their eyes do not leave him. Their minds shimmer. Bright and focused even in their uncertainty and fear. 

Once, Hux had thought _this gift: it’s my most precious tool_

“The _Finalizer_ and her crew,” Hux says, cutting a chunk of his protein portion and mashing it with the tines of his fork to make it edible, “will have a new mission. I suspect it will for active combat. We are in a state of war now, although not much has happened.”

Fon swallows a slice of what is definitely rehydrated egg; it seems he’s been lucky today with his ration lottery. He stares straight at Hux as Orovax pretends to be absorbed in stirring her granola. Fon always showed backbone, even when it wasn’t good for him. Ren threw him across the bridge once, a full year ago now. It was the only time Hux drew his blaster with intent to kill on the _Finalizer_ until everything fell apart. Ren had deflected the bolt, but the hole it left in the ceiling had spread the story all around the ship and Starkiller Base.

Fon has never turned away from any order that Hux has given.

“You do not expect to come with us.”

Hux puts a spoonful of granola in his mouth. He chews. Swallows. After a long moment, Orovax and Fon continue to eat as well. They finish lunch, placing the trays in the washer. Orovax depart to utilise their recreational shift as they please. Hux turns back towards the main conference room. He has orders to relay across the First Order fleet. 

It’s not, Hux has always understood, about keeping things. Hux has never owned anything in his life.

 _you’re too reckless_ General Faro had thought.

Hux, now that he is a General, too, agrees.

He is a tool. A weapon. He is far more useful alive than dead. 

 

In the Academy, Hux’s highest scores were in strategy and tactics followed closely by battle simulation. Due to those record-breaking scores, he had ranked first in his year. Rigger outranked him overall in physical combat, but Hux scored higher on overall weapons competency. The fact he’d been dumped immediately onto the wreck that the _Minotaur_ had been under General Nanarat had been something of a scandal. Hux hadn’t cared. He’d been too wrapped up in his lunacy back then.

Hux comes to understand this after Snoke pulls a rib out of Hux’s back on his thirty-first birthday. It breaks something else in Hux. It is the first time that he screams. He’s still crying when the droids return him to the _Finalizer_. It makes Meera’s hands shake when he uncovers the massive black cloak that he’s been delivered in. A birthday gift. A Sith artefact.

“General,” Meera says, and his voice cracks as Hux sobs and bleeds on the deck. 

“It was only the lower left floating rib,” Meera says when Hux comes back to consciousness; he’s clutching his scanner so hard that he may hurt himself. “You will heal.”

 _If this continues, he will die_ is what Meera is really thinking, aggrieved and angry and so, so afraid because _then what will we do? Who will we serve? We can’t serve anyone else. Not after this. We know too much. There is no one half as gifted as you_

“Doctor,” Hux says.

Meera winces. His eyes glitter. Flicker. Tears and fire. He swallows. He doesn’t believe in the Force any more than Hux does. He knows what he sees.

They are running out of time.

_lunatic General I should have never accepted this assignment I’m such a fool I don’t want anyone else to die_

Hux closes his eyes.

“Doctor,” he mutters because he is weak and he is beaten. “I am aware.” 

Meera says nothing. There is nothing to say. To think. They are products of the Academy. Of the First Order.

“Try to sleep,” Meera says, and it’s gruff and scratches deep. “I can’t drug you with all the blood you lost.” 

Hux understands. He doesn’t, however, attempt to sleep. He wanders, instead, through the minds of those around him. Meera stews in his grief and his doubt. It is a common combination of feelings on the _Finalizer_. Everyone has lost so much. Hux sacrificed it all for Starkiller. For Rigger. For revenge. 

He does not regret it. Hux is not that sort of creature. He is a creature of instinct at his very core. As it was instinct that drove him, there is no reason to regret. 

Hux is a tool. A weapon. He was not born to fix anything.

Snoke is right. 

He is a gift. The Dark Side incarnate.

 

Unwittingly, Hux actually falls asleep.

He doesn’t realise it at first. It’s different than how his sleep usually is. The void is not an empty hole. It stretches as it always does, the galaxy screaming through it, but there’s a strangeness. 

Hux stands up. He reaches up. Touches his face. His hair. Presses his fingers together. Against his upper arms. Sternum. He wiggles his toes. He’s dressed in the regulation blacks he used to like to relax in. No slippers. Just the socks. 

Hux does not remember the last time he felt like this. He doesn’t know what to think. 

He feels, strangely, like he could laugh. A little bit. 

The last time he felt like this Phasma was with him.

The void contracts. Expands. 

A supernova.

Phasma is sitting at a desk with a datapad. 

Hux blanks.

When he comes back to himself, Phasma is still sitting at the desk. Still reading on her pad. She is also dressed in regulation blacks, and the room that she is in a room like what Hux stayed in the month he was planet side on Coruscant after Rigger died. She must have been in hospital. She looks different. Older and battered. A little thin for how Hux knows her and her hair is shorter. But she is whole. Alive. Breathing. 

“Phasma?”

She doesn’t respond. Hux takes a step forward. Onto the small carpet these rooms have for officers. He can feel the terrible scratchiness even through his socks. She doesn’t react. That tells him what he needs to know:

Either this isn’t real, or Hux isn’t physically there. It shouldn’t be real. But Hux is a lunatic. This, he is certain, is more real than anything else. Including himself.

Hux is still, even after all that has happened, a creature of instinct.

"Phasma," he says, much softer.

Because this is not real, Hux reaches out. He touches the tips of his ring and middle fingers against the ends of her hair. The curve of her shoulder. The wrist of the hand swiping and tapping the pad. She does not react. She is warm. Alive. Whole.

The last time Hux was this happy, Rigger and he were lying together on Naboo.

He has no idea how long he spends like this in the void. It is definitely still the void, but it is not as he's come to know it. It is as it once was when he was a child. When he didn't know it as the void but instead as a gift. Hux only draws his hand back when Phasma lets out a blustery sigh, leaning back and stretching her arms above her head. Her shoulders both pop from being in the same position for so long.

"Right," Phasma mutters, standing up and nearly stepping straight into Hux. "Back to the _Minotaur_ at 1000."

She begins to get ready for an early bed. Hux follows her around the tiny bedsit and bath. He is unseen and unheard, and it isn’t as if they have anything to hide from each other. He doesn't dare take his eyes off her, uncertain if this'll all end if he does. She has new scars, mostly on her ankles and knees. Surgery, perhaps, but she moves well. Hux wants to ask her how she got them. Phasma has always loved to boast about her scars. To her, they were proof she had fought. That she hadn’t died.

He knows that he must eventually. He cannot linger here. This is not a gift.

"Phasma," Hux whispers as she climbs into bed and he settles himself at the foot, which has just enough space for him to ball himself up between it and the wall. "Please don't die."

Somehow, Hux dozes off again like that. Inadvertently, as this whole experience has been, he follows Phasma into her dreams. Perhaps it’s because he’s done this so often over the past seven years. She often dreams of old battles. It’s not alarming, although Hux supposes it could be if she didn’t enjoy the violence so much. For Phasma, these are good dreams. For Hux, the familiarity is steadying. The steadiness is soothing. 

Tonight, Phasma is dreaming of the night before a bloody battle on the second world that General Faro conquered. It is lush green world, which Phasma was used to from her early training days. Hux was not. He grew up first on Coruscant, heavily industrialised, and then at the Academy, a temperate, climate-control place. Most of the worlds the _Minotaur_ had taken him to before then had been extreme: desert and ocean worlds that fell easily because General Nanarat hadn’t cared to plan beyond the basics. Faro was more ambitious. More vicious. Entirely self-serving and eager to watch galaxy burn. Both Phasma and Hux flourished under her.

In the dream, there are two Phasmas, one obviously part of the dream and the other lucid and aware of it. The lucid Phasma glances back at Hux, who lingers on the fringe of the clearing, even as she dreams of a slightly younger version. Still newly minted Colonel Hux is eating a protein ration next to the fire. He’s looking up through the trees at the stars. Phasma, also recently promoted to First Lieutenant, is lain out on her back. Her helmet catches are released to allow fresh air to come in. 

The lucid Phasma, completely armoured but bereft of her helmet as she always is in her dreams, smiles. Unsurprised to find Hux here, an aware presence in what should just be her dream. She thinks she’s dreaming of him, too. She misses talking to him just as he does with her.

“Do you remember this?” 

Hux cannot speak. This isn’t like earlier, hallucinating himself in Phasma’s bedsit. His throat is tight. He can only force himself to nod. Phasma’s lips twitch before she turns back to the scene. There’s others from that time in the dream, but they all face away. Faces shadowed and obscured.

“We were really happy back then,” she says.

She would never say that in waking life. Phasma feels, as most people do, that she’s safer in her dreams. Hux smiles a little. A mirror of her own lip twitch.

Hux takes a couple steps forward. Tilts his head slightly to look at his own face. This was well before Rigger died, he realises. He doesn’t look too terribly different, but Phasma dreams of this younger Hux with light in his eyes. Not a good light exactly. It’s clearly fractured, but it’s something all the same. On the grass, the younger Phasma’s body is relaxed. Content. 

That’s what this dream is about.

Hux straightens up. Looks back at the lucid Phasma. She smiles at him again, a sadder look.

“Does it help to be here?”

It’s not a reference to this particular dream or memory. Phasma must have figured out that Hux is somehow inside of her head. Her mind flashes to a memory of Faro and Hux on the bridge of the _Minotaur_ from around the same period as this dream. Hux’s face is calm as he stands in parade rest two paces behind Faro. He watches her, an almost awestruck look in his eyes. Phasma had thought that he was in love. It was before Phasma knew about Hux’s lunacy. That he was inside of Faro’s head, attempting to learn how to imitate Faro’s thoughts and emotional patterns. 

Phasma completely understands what Hux is doing with her right now.

“Yes,” Hux says.

Her expression is sober but not unwelcoming. There’s a thread of faint discomfort and confusion, but the dream’s contentment remains strong. She misses him, a warm, thorny feeling. Hux wants to rub himself against it. Smear himself in blood.

She’d thought he was beautiful like that. 

“Bathed in the blood of your enemies,” Phasma says, and she smiles in that way that makes her eyes gleam. “As I met you.” 

 

Hux wakes up to medical droids screaming as they are thrown into the ceiling. Someone is screaming. Howling. Crying. A voice Hux has begun to forget in its physical form.

Ren is awake.

He’s curled on his belly, hands fisted and tearing at the sheets of his cot. There’s a warped hole in the wall behind the head of the bed. Meera is in the window of the office, banging on the window with his fists. The door must be fused shut.

The walls of medical groan.

Hux struggles to sit up. He’s in bad condition. The wound in his side only just fused due to bacta. The Sith remedy has worn off completely and Meera was not able to administer any pain suppressants. Hux grasps the IV stand. Uses the wheels and stand to move himself to Ren’s bedside.

“Lord Ren,” he says.

Nothing. There is too much chaos inside of Ren’s head. Too much grief. Too much anger. Too much Light. 

Hux reaches up. Tears the IV line out. Rocks back.

He punches Ren in the side where the Wookie’s bowcaster nearly tore out his intestines. It throws Ren off of the cot. Hux collapses on his knees, his own upper body crashing atop the ruined sheets and mattress. Medical droids hit the ground with squeals and cracking thuds. Ren reels up, eyes blown wide. Hux feels blood seeping out of his own side.

Ren opens his mouth. To scream. Terrified. Confused. So, so angry.

Hux seizes it all.

_STOP DESTROYING MY SHIP_

Ren is arched, head thrown back and ribcage exposed. Silent and frozen. Fingers hyper-extended. He looks as if he’s been electrocuted. His mind is a blank space. The only emotion that Hux can find is fragmented shock and pain. 

He has been electrocuted, Hux realises. It’s like how he addled Meera’s previous superior. Ren twitches, muscles convulsing. Hux breathes in. Out. His heart thunders in his ears. It’s only now that Ren is suddenly silent that Hux realises how quiet it is. How much he has been living inside of Ren’s head these past seven months.

“Ren?” 

It makes his fingers twitch. Convulse. Ren’s head tosses left. Right. His mind remains blank. Shocked. Behind him, Hux can hear Meera yanking open the door to the office with a metallic screech. 

“General –”

Hux crawls onto Ren’s tattered cot. Blood drips onto the crumpled sheets. Ren rocks slightly, legs folded underneath himself. The drawstring pants of regulation blacks are torn around the knees. 

He looks broken.

“Bleeding bantha shit.”

Meera comes to stand at the foot of Ren’s bed. He’s got a long cut down the side of his right jaw and neck that he’s got his medical coat pressed against. He stares at Ren, who is still arched in that unnatural position. Like he’s been suspended in a twisted imitation of his own lightsaber. Meera swallows. Look at Hux as renewed terror rolls off him.

“Are you,” Meera starts, his voice wavering and cracking, “doing this?”

Hux doesn’t know. If he is, he isn’t in control of it. There are, he understands from what Snoke has done to him, many things that Hux doesn’t know. That he isn’t in control of. Hux is a lunatic after all.

Meera is shaking. He swallows. Recoils. So, so scared.

Hux lifts his hand. His fingertips reach Ren’s face. He traces his fore and middle fingers over the scar. Cheek. Jaw.

“Ren,” he says. “Wake up.”

It’s like Ren has been electrocuted all over again. He jolts, falling backwards into the empty neighbouring cot. Curls onto his side and into a ball. His hands shield his face, knees pressed to his knuckles. Pain blooms in the void. Frightened and grieving and confused. 

_hurts hurts hurts hurts hurts_

“I can’t do anything about that,” Hux says before he realises it was out loud; it doesn’t matter anymore. “Pull yourself together.”

Ren sobs. Physically. Into the void. Hux slumps. Presses the hand he’d raised to his bleeding side. His head swims. Pain and trepidation and exhaustion.

“Doctor,” Hux says, “if you are able, please attend to him.”

Meera wavers. Unsure if he should lie and say he needs time to recover himself. Unsure if he could get away with lying. Unsure about all of his life choices that have led to this point. Hux slumps into the ruined cot. Onto his uninjured side. This is not wholly unfamiliar. It’s like how he and Ren fought in the last year of Starkiller Base’s construction. Hux used to need pills to be able to do anything physical to Ren.

Now –

 _Hux?_ Ren’s mind inquires, weak and battered and reaching.

The void widens.

Hux closes his eyes. The galaxy screams. 

“I’m here.”

 

Hux has only healed enough to not bleed with careful movement when he releases himself from medical.

Meera doesn’t protest. Ren does, a pelting of anxiety, anger, and displeasure in the void. Hux ignores it as he dresses in the greatcoat that Meera helps him into. Walking from medical to his own quarters is an exercise in all the self-control that Hux has ever had. It is the end of gamma shift. The halls are not empty. The people he passes straighten and salute. It is a lifetime of engrained instinct that allows him to return the greetings. To not react to their alarm and concern and fear.

Once back inside of his own quarters, Hux takes off his boots. Socks. The droids cleaned him up in medical, and he’s already in regulation blacks that he prefers sleeping in beneath the greatcoat. His bed is rumpled, unmade as he’s fallen into the habit of in the past seven months as he descended further and further into Snoke’s clutches. Into his lunacy. 

Hux lies down. Pulls the covers up over his body. Over his head. It’s a childish habit he’s never been able to break himself of. When he was very young and Nell was still around to call him Brennie, he had been afraid that he would wake up to eyes watching him. Even when he’d slept dirt-side during combat missions, he’d put his cap over his eyes. His eyesight was never his main asset anyways. 

He can hear everything.

The _Finalizer_ is unsettled. Ren’s awakening has spread through the rumour mill as well as the news that Hux has left medical. None of Ren’s knights are currently on the ship. They were sent away months ago by Snoke on the only orders in the First Order that Hux is not currently privy to. It is likely they were sent to die. 

It is just after the beginning of graveyard shift when Ren is informed that his knights are not here. He leaves medical in a flurry of anger and frustration and grief. Hux listens to him slam his way down the halls, thoughts and emotions flying ahead of him. He crashes into Hux’s quarters just as Hux pulls the blanket from his head. He doesn’t bother to sit up. 

“Where are they?” Ren roars.

Hux stares at him. Ren is dressed only in the white medical pants that his legs are slightly too long for. His ankles and feet stand bony and stark, haloed by the emergency lights of Hux’s destroyed door. 

His mind is burning, a thousand stars bursting in supernova.

Snoke was right, Hux realises. Killing his father did make Ren stronger. Has brought him closer to finishing his training. But not how Ren thought it would. 

“Where are they?” he asks again, no less loud, no less bright. 

He is so very full of Light.

Ren steps into the room. Crosses the floor to grab Hux by the fabric of his shirt. He pulls Hux up and shoves him against the wall that frames the right of the bed. Hux looks at him. At the horrible scar that splits his face and has created a lazy right eye. The damage makes it so much more apparent how very much Ren glows. 

“ _Find_ them,” Ren says; he shakes Hux, just enough to threaten to reopen Hux’s side wound. “I _know_ you can.”

“I can’t,” Hux says because it is true.

Ren curses. Shakes him before letting go to punch the wall. Hux slides down to sit on the bed, his right hand drifting up to hold his wounded side. Ren looms over him. Eyes wide and blown, bonfires in the dark. His lips are parted and his teeth clenched, overgrown hair falling in curtains to tickle Hux’s upturned face. 

Slowly, shakily, Ren lifts his left hand. Hux watches him extend his arm. Listens to how Ren screams. Grieves. Ren’s blunted nails scratch over his neck. His fingers closing around Hux’s throat. Squeeze.

He burns so bright.

“You haven’t,” Ren breathes, “changed at all.”

It makes Hux laugh. Makes Ren tighten his grip. He leans further down. Right leg lifting to fold on the bed. Slotting itself between Hux’s unevenly splayed knees. Ren’s eyes dance with that manic, grieving fire. 

Hux, as Ren crushes his windpipe, can’t help but smile. 

“I hate you,” Ren whispers against the shell of Hux’s ear.

 _you are the only reason I didn’t die_ he admits, all the grief poured forth with those words.

Ren climbs onto the bed. Keeps his hand on Hux’s throat as he eases the other between Hux’s legs. Hux laughs again, a choking noise, as Ren palms him through the tangled blanket, regulation trousers, and pants. It is rough and inept and passionate. Burning red with anger, grief, need, loss.

He offers it all up to Hux on a silver platter. 

“Do you want this?” Ren asks, lips against Hux’s earlobe, a hint of teeth for tugging.

 _I would do anything for you_ Ren promises, passionate and young and reckless.

Hux is a creature of instinct. He is reckless, too. 

“Yes,” he whispers, reaching up with his left hand to cup the back of Ren’s head. “Close the door.”

The mangled door slams up and warps to fit back into the frame. Ren pulls back briefly to tear the blanket from between them. Hux reaches down and unbuttons his trousers, shifting to get out of them and his pants. They shift together on the bed so that Hux sits at the head, his pillow bunched behind his back, Ren between his thighs. They stare at each other for a long moment before Hux reaches out. Tugs at Ren’s hair.

“Get on with it.”

It makes Ren smile. They both are thinking the same thing. Snoke definitely knows what is happening. There’s only so long until he makes an appearance. Ren is Snoke’s dog. He is meant to bring Hux to heel, too. 

It exposes how little Snoke understands. Hux is not a dog. He is not a being. He is a tool. A weapon. Born and bred to fight and die when he was grown.

Ren’s nails scratch against the underside of Hux’s left knee. 

_pay attention to me_

Hux pulls his hair. It makes Ren grunt, Hux filling his mouth. There’s a hint of teeth, so Hux tightens his pull. There is pain and passion and desperation, tongue and wet and heat as Ren takes Hux deeper. Hux presses the heel of his foot against the Wookie’s bowcaster wound. It makes Ren groan. 

_bring him to me_ Snoke shears across Hux’s brain.

Something rises up inside of Hux. The memory of a thousand minds. Whispering. Sibilant. Liars. 

_I’d like to see him rise_ people have always thought.

 _I’d like to see him fall_ they thought at the same time.

Hux closes his hands. Presses Ren down as he spills himself down the wet, warm throat. Ren chokes and scrabbles, nails racking over Hux’s hips, the delicate skin of his inner thighs. His saliva and Hux’s come a hot mess in his mouth, lips, dribbling down over Hux’s groin. He’s spilt himself in the medical trousers. He can hear Snoke, too.

He trusts Hux with his life.

“Yes,” Hux says, aloud and into the void; a roaring scream, “Supreme Leader.”

Deep down in his lunacy, as Ren pulls back slightly only to swallow and return to lick him clean, a plan blooms.

 

Hux adores killing.

He is not like his father or Snoke, architects of their own designs. He is not like Rigger and Phasma, who are warriors who blossom in combat. Hux is a killer. He is an executioner. In that moment, where life meets death, everything matches. There is no dissonance. It is the singular purest moment in existence. To kill, to bring that pure moment about: there is no greater power that Hux knows. 

This is what Hux thinks as Snoke tests Ren after reopening Hux’s wound by hurling him into the steel wall. Ren buckles quickly. His body is not completely wasted despite his long sleep, but he is weakened, stiff and rusty, mind and body lagging. It enrages Snoke as much as it amuses him, the contradictory emotions of creature unused to having suboptimal tools. 

So arrogant, Hux can’t help but think. 

“So was your father,” Snoke hisses, pressing hard against Hux’s throat and brain. “A human with grand designs and not enough time.”

He thinks it hurts Hux. Thinks that Hux’s physical bleeding is the same as his pain. It shows how little Snoke understands. Hux does not care. His father is long dead, floating forever in the void of space. Hux said his goodbyes long ago, sitting in medical in the Academy and avoiding suicide watch. Everyone has their time. Their place in a greater design. 

The Academy, although it probably wasn’t meant to, taught Hux this. All students were taught to suppress uprisings if they showed enough competency to enter a command track. Hux’s sky-high scores guaranteed his early exposure to the battle scenarios of overwhelming odds, abysmal resources, and impossible demands by the time he was fourteen. He exceled at overcoming all those scenarios and at figuring out the best way to cut the First Order’s losses when he was set with a no-win scenario. They designed him to be ruthless but logical, reckless but useful. 

No one realised that Hux figured out that it could be turned around. That, by teaching him to suppress rebellion, he was also learning how to conduct one. To account for all the weaknesses, to combat all the strengths: it was only a simple exercise to begin to plot his own coup d’état.

These are things that were drilled into him so deep that Hux doesn’t have to think to see all the threads. All the pathways lie themselves out before him, and he doesn’t have to think about which one to take. It was why he admired Faro’s mind so very much, why he worked for his time on the _Minotaur_ to mould his own thoughts into parallel, flowing lanes. It is why Snoke cannot pull these thoughts from his head. He fundamentally does not understand how Hux thinks. He thinks Hux is human, that he thinks by feeling, contradicting himself by his desires and dreams.

Hux has no desires. He has never dreamed. He does care or feel anything.

Snoke has discarded them temporarily. They were dragged from the throne room atop of a massive black swatch of fabric by two droids. They’re still lying on it after the droids shut them in a windowless room lit by pale lights along the walls. If not for a lifetime living by the Imperial clock of alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and graveyard shifts, it would be all too easy to lose track of time. 

It is mid-graveyard shift, three cycles since they arrived here.

They haven’t been fed. The only thing they’ve been given to drink is a canteen full of that detestable Sith remedy. Ren only managed a sip before he nearly threw up. Hux has drunk the majority of it, but he has a much higher tolerance after all of these months. It dulls the physical pain. It allows Hux to think. To plan.

 _you’re dangerous like that_ Ren thinks. 

"Hux?" Ren asks, aloud and very soft. "What are you doing?"

Hux doesn't know. He never did. He is a tool. He was born to rule. Ren can sense his thoughts. They've spent too much time together. Fighting each other on the _Finalizer_ and Starkiller Base. Lying together in medical, sitting inside of each other's heads. Screaming into the void.

 _a Force bond_ Ren offers tentatively, recklessly.

 _weakness_ Hux agrees, admonishingly.

But the lack of retribution makes Snoke’s weakness clear. For all his power, Snoke is unaware of this thing that lies between them. Just as he is unaware that there is nothing that he can steal from Hux. That it is Snoke who has something to lose. Ren. This planet. The First Order. The kingdom that he thought was his own.

An architect who is really just another tool in the design.

Ren shifts. Uncomfortable. Afraid. And, as he always is, passionately, brilliantly angry. 

Hux takes the last emotion. Drapes himself in it. A star in his heart and fist.

He pulls.

The door shrieks on its track as Hux forces it open. 

Neither of them move. Hux breathes through his teeth. It hurts, using this extension of his lunacy. Snoke has spent months now attempting to force it out of him. But Snoke is closed to Hux, a creature too much like him to be used. Hux will die before he uses his crew. Ren is different. He is a known commodity. They fought each other back when Ren was Snoke's dog and Hux had his revenge. In the wake of that revenge, that existence, Ren let Hux in.

_I'm here_

“Ren.”

He looks up. The scar stands stark. His right eye lags. New blood drips down from beneath his hair. Hux pushes himself to his feet. The cloak they’ve been lain on top of crinkles beneath him. His body trembles with the effort to stay upright.

“The canteen,” Hux says, pointing at it where it lies just within reach of Ren’s left hand. “Give it to me.”

Ren does. He forces himself to his own feet. His knees don’t obey him the first time. Hux fumbles off the cap. Drinks down Ren’s share of the Sith remedy. It dulls the physical pain. It does nothing for everything else.

For the first time, that’s the point.

Hux looks into the dark emptiness of the canteen. Ren hisses his breath out through his teeth. Steadying himself in his physical pain. Like he does with his anger, his hopes, fears, desires. Hux has none of those things. He doesn’t care.

“Ren.”

Their eyes meet. Ren doesn’t hesitate. He reaches out. Hux reaches, too. Takes Ren’s wrist. They stand, wobbly and stumbling together. 

Two ships passing in the night.

_Hux_

The remedy is kicking in. Hux leans down. Gathers the cloak up. He drapes it over his and Ren’s hands. Feels Ren’s hand tighten on his wrist.

Ren is Snoke’s dog.

_Vader betrayed his master, too_

Neither of them have to think.

They run.

 

The ramp up to the _Finalizer_ begins rising as soon as both Hux and Ren board it, an army of Snoke’s droids held back by Ren’s Force and Hux’s lunacy. The droids shriek on the dusty earth of the planet. Their protests stir the memory of Rigger and Hux’s midnight jaunts to the Academy kitchen. How Hux, without realising he was doing it, silenced their protocol alarms.

The bridge is ready. It is not yet alpha shift, but the crew is there. Hux does not fully understand how this is, but he cannot stop to question it. He is a lunatic, and there are an infinite number of things he cannot comprehend. Ren stumbles after him, the cloak unravelling from their hands between them as Hux throws himself into the command chair. He slams in coordinates, driven by instinct as he always has been as he shouts orders at the crew.

“Ready for take-off!”

No one questions. There’s a sense that they have all been waiting for this, that they were poised to obey for months if not years. Colonel Orovax and Captain Fon work in perfect sync, their hands at the main navigation panels as the _Finalizer_ screams into emergency vertical take-off.

Ren clutches the back of the command chair to avoid falling into the back wall. The _Finalizer_ attempts to level out as it hurdles through the atmosphere. Everything groans. Buckles. 

A billion needles drill against Hux’s brain.

Snoke is trying to stop them. 

A memory surfaces.

Once, Hux was eighteen. He went swimming in a lake with Rigger on Naboo. He traded stones for fish with Gungans. He ate sticky sweets and explored lush, picturesque forests. And, for a few precious, enchanted night, he lay hand in hand with his best friend.

For that week, Hux could pretend he had something that was his own. He was so very happy. To have experience that, just that once:

That was enough.

Hux has had a good life.

“We’re being pulled down!”

Hux looks out the view port. Out into the void of space. He presses his hands the command console. Behind him, Ren’s fingers grip his shoulders. Holding his still. Holding him up. Snoke’s planet is below them. Snoke is trying to hold them. Keep them. All of the things that a creature of instinct, of the Dark wants to call their own.

Snoke thinks himself an architect, just like Hux’s father.

Hux is a tool. A weapon. He is not so arrogant to call any of this his own. 

He built Starkiller to feed off of the base planet’s sun until it burnt itself out into a black hole.

He built Starkiller for revenge.

This is the same.

Behind him, Ren’s mind flares. Full of Light. Full of pain and anger and fear as Snoke attempts to pull the _Finalizer_ down. The ship buckles, caught halfway out of the atmosphere. The minds of the crew scream. Fear, terror, a thousand hopes and dreams.

Hux closes his eyes. 

_you can fight and die when you’re grown_

“Colonel Orovax,” he orders, whispers, roars, “make the jump _now_!”

The void opens wide. 

Hux takes hold. 

He drowns the sun in the void.

 

**Rey.**

Something collapses.

Rey’s knees hit the rocky ground at the base of the Jedi temple. She scrabbles for purchase on the rocks, picking off moss and tufts of grass beneath her fingernails. 

There’s a voice wailing in the force. Like it did months ago. It’s impossible not to recognise it. It had called out for Captain Phasma of the First Order then. Now, though, all Rey can register from it is exhausted pain.

 _Hello?_ Rey calls back, even as she tries to search for Skywalker through the bond of master and growing friendship. 

_What’s happened?_ Skywalker calls, reaching back to Rey to check on her, desperate from old and new memories to know that she is not seriously hurt. _Who are you?_

There’s no mentally comprehensible response. There’s only the wailing and the exhaustion and pain. It’s as if there is a hole in the Force. Eventually, Rey manages to climb up enough of the stairs to shelter in one of the smaller caves. Skywalker comes to her, obviously equally strained but with enough mental barriers from decades of training to function. They huddle together until the wailing subsides, the sensation of exhaustion and pain receding. Perhaps whoever this is has finally fallen unconscious. The hole in the Force remains.

“No idea what it was,” General Organa says when Skywalker contacts her once they move back to the cave that is the least drafty, which they’ve been using as home. “There’s been no reports of oddity. No one except for those of us with a conscious connection to the Force are likely to be aware of anything strange.”

“It’s the same person,” Rey says.

Organa and Skywalker both nod, mouths set in identical serious lines. “The First Order must be planning something,” Organa surmises. “That General Hux hasn’t broadcast anything recently as the voice of their ‘Supreme Leader’.”

“We need to head them off,” Skywalker says after they debate for well over six hours; Rey can feel how much it pains him.

“We cannot be in the dark,” Organa agrees, the same pain in every inch of her presence. “If there is even a chance that it’s another…”

She does not say Starkiller. She does not say Kylo Ren’s name. It pains her too much. Because of who he once was. Because of what he’s become. Of all the things that have passed and been destroyed. The First Order, Kylo Ren, and that strange Supreme Leader called Snoke: all of it hurts them all in an infinity of different ways. 

Organa takes a long, deep breath. 

“I’ll set all resources on alert. The next time anyone of the Resistance picks up movement of the First Order, we will act.”

It’s going to be dangerous. Organa won’t be able to mobilise all of the Resistance. There’s too much bureaucracy. It means that it’s really just them. Rey, Finn, and Dameron. Maybe Chewbacca if Organa is able to spare him. Skywalker nods before looking to Rey. She looks back at him. Nods.

It’s time she returned to the sky, too.

 

**Hux.**

“Hux.”

It’s Ren. Kylo. Once Solo. Once Ben. A knight. A killer. A saviour. Or someone who could have been.

“Bleeding bantha shit,” Ren swears.

Hux’s mind is hopelessly muddled. The void will not close. Never could close. He doesn’t know where he is. When he is. If he ever existed in the first place. 

_I’m here_ Ren screams, desperate and afraid and _don’t you dare leave me alone_

In the Dark. In the void. Ren is so full of Light. It’ll eat him alive. Snoke already tried.

Hux does not care. He doesn’t know how to. He lost that. Like he lost Rigger. His father. Nell. Once, Hux was Bren. Brennie.

_you can fight and die when you’re grown_

Hux lifts his hands. His fingers find Ren’s hair. He must be leaning very close. His face is wet. 

Ren sobs.

_don’t die_

Light.

_DON’T DIE_

Ren has opens his mind to Hux completely. He shoves himself into Hux. Floods him with Light, with warmth, with _Ren_ who is pleading, screaming, sobbing

_I don’t care what you want you can’t leave me alone here I’m scared I’m weak please please please Hux YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DIE_

No more doubts. No more barriers. A billion synapses pulsing and firing. 

Sources of infinite power.

Hux folds himself around them. Ensnaring them. Following them to where they meet in the void.

In Ren.

Hux looks out through Ren’s eyes.

A storm. They are bedded down in the undergrowth on a forest planet that Ben knows from his youth. Not from conscious memory but from the Force, which, in this desperate time, guided Ben back. He was born here. Not on an Resistance base like Ben’s records say. Not in hospital like Ren’s records claim. Here, Leia Organa lay and screamed. Chewbacca was the only one around. She gripped his hand so hard that she broke the Wookie’s bones. 

This is completely insane. But that is not new.

“My ship,” Hux says, although he cannot tell what is now and what was then; he has tangled himself up in memories neither of them should rightfully have. “Where is my ship?”

An image surfaces in Ren’s mind. The _Finalizer_ smashing the forest to land. The remaining crew, terrified and screaming but whole. No one understanding how they’d gotten here. Displays throwing up confused screens and holograms. Hux, crumpling upon the now level bridge. For the first time, completely silent. Burnt out.

With the power of Snoke’s dying sun, Hux had opened a wormhole. The _Finalizer_ had jumped through it as Hux used the remaining power to partially collapse Snoke’s planet so the ship could escape the atmosphere. Snoke is likely still alive because his planet is still partially intact. Hux couldn’t finish him off and get the _Finalizer_ away safely. 

Hux, for the first time in his life, made a choice. 

He chose his ship. His crew. His domain.

And, for a full minute as Ren dragged him up into his arms on the bridge, Hux had died.

Ren’s mind is open. Replaying the events. He was driven by instinct. By memory. He’d carried Hux out. Off of the ship even as the crew yelled behind him. Into the rain. There is something about this rain. About this planet. He hadn’t thought. Hadn’t needed to. It was instinct. Hux had been coated blood and the dust of Snoke’s planet. They had to get it off.

It’s a terribly rainy world, this forest planet that Ren was born upon.

“Yes,” Ren says, swallowing. 

_yes_

They return to the _Finalizer_. Hux doesn’t open his eyes. Doesn’t have the strength. It is the Force of his lunacy that is holding him together. His instincts do not scream as his crew meet them halfway, Fon and Meera screaming abuse at Ren. They are both herded back into medical. It is familiar. Quiet. Almost comforting. Hux is buried inside of Ren’s brain.

 _don’t do this_ Ren thinks.

 _you need to come back_ he begs.

 _I’m here_ all of him screams.

Hux smiles. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Into his lunacy. Into his crew. Into Ren. He isn’t sure.

He doesn’t need to be.

 _yes_

His lunacy folds around him. He is lying on a forest planet. Ren’s hand in his. The void of space is far above. In it is silence. Wondrous, perfect silence.

_I’ve finally died_

 

Hux dreams.

Or whatever passes for a dream for someone like him.

He dreams of General Faro on the _Minotaur_. She’s sitting on a chair next to a cot in medical. Phasma is there, sitting up on the cot. She still looks battered from her long rehabilitation, but her eyes are as sharp as they have always been. They widen in shock at Hux. Faro’s eyes slide in his direction. Her tongue moves over her teeth. Her usual tell of surprise.

“Well, Captain,” she says, shifting in her fluid way to face Hux. “We have a visitor.”

“General?” Phasma says, and there’s something wrong with her throat; it’s strangely artificial even though she wears no armour, no helmet. “Are you a ghost?”

Hux doesn’t know. The possibility, though, bothers him. He wants to die. He doesn’t want to linger. He tries to move, but he cannot. Phasma stares at him, thoughts chaotic, alarmed, and jumbled. Faro runs her tongue over her teeth, thoughts emotions a smooth loop that starts at mild puzzlement and ends with faint amusement.

“Meddling again,” Faro says before wriggling her fingers at him. “I don’t need another general on my ship.”

Hux wakes up.

He gazes at the familiar ceiling of _Finalizer_ ’s medical, an IV under his scarred collarbones and the familiar oxygen mask strapped over his face. His body aches. The ship, world, galaxy screams inside of his head. Louder than ever before. He feels raw. Like he somehow tore every muscle and ligament in his body. 

Something warm and Light presses against his mind.

_Ren?_

There’s a touch against his head. His hair. Fingers. The press of a bludgeon. Warm.

Ren is next to him. Tucked up against him on the thin medical cot. Like they did so many nights before Ren woke. Hux had been the one who crawled into his bed. Unlike then, Ren is deeply asleep, that pale sensation of light all that exists in his mind. The rest of the ship is the same although understandably unsettled; the graveyard crew continues their routine as they should, creatures of habit and routine after a lifetime of training. The planet, full of lush green things and sparsely populated intelligent minds, is coated in a light rainfall. It feels strange to Hux, who has never been on a planet with such greenery for longer than ground combat operations lasted. 

_laughing, arms slung around Phasma’s shoulders. She’s carrying him piggyback because Hux’s ankle is busted. They stink of sweat, blood, and gore. Next to him, old Captain Agon is laughing his crackling cough at their foolishness. Hux is happy happy so so happy_

He misses Phasma so much it hurts.

“Ren.”

Next to him, the body shifts. The eyes that open are Ben, soft and tired and a little dozy. He blinks and he is Ren again, the sharp cross of his thoughts and emotions plain for Hux to listen and feel.

“Hux,” he says, sitting up but not moving away on the bed; his bad eye droops slightly with sleep. “How long have you been awake?”

Hux doesn’t know. Ren frowns, eyebrows drawing together and causing the scar to twist. He swings his legs off the bed. Stands up with gritted teeth. The scar in his side is paining him.

“The doctor’s asleep,” he says because they only have the one now. “I’ll wake him.”

The droids scan and prod Hux. He lets them. He feels like a doll. An empty husk. Meera comes back with Ren, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The cut on his neck and jaw from Ren’s violent awakening is still an angry red under the bacta strips. Hux has not been unconscious for long.

“Back from the dead again, General?” Meera asks with the good half of his mouth. 

He sounds like Faro. 

“Yes,” Hux says.

 _unfortunately_ he cannot help but think.

Ren’s fists clench. He looms in the background while Meera scans Hux. There’s no change. He is alive, whole, and fairly healthy with his medical history in mind and with all the recent events considered. Meera slouches as he stands back while the droids inject Hux with nutrients. Ren looms, desperate frustration and very real fear underneath. 

“Hux,” he says because he’s thinking of Snoke; he’s never stopped and maybe never will. “What do we do now?”

It’s a good question. Hux doesn’t have an answer. He’d lied about his plan. Ren knew it was a lie because he could see Hux’s thoughts, but the crew does not. They cannot know; they’ve already lost so much. Hux is tired and weaker than he ever has been in his life. His father is attempting to claw up over his thoughts in his skull. An architect taking control back from the tool. Hux would let him.

But Ren is here. He reaches out. Pushes the spectre back.

“Hux,” he says again.

He steps forward. Sitting down on the side of the bed, interrupting Meera’s scan. He takes Hux’s wrist. As Hux once did obsessively when Ren lay in his strange sleep. His grip is firm and so very warm. 

“Please. I can’t…” 

Ren is grieving. Conflicted. Afraid. He is in constant turmoil, full of regrets and uncertainties over his choices and actions. The person he most wants to ask for guidance is someone he only has relics of: Vader’s helmet and now his cloak. He was born to the New Republic and Resistance but was moulded by Snoke’s hand. He wants the Dark when he’s so full of the Light. Ren is full of so many things, so many contradictions. He is, by definition, incomplete. 

_you need training_ Ren had said so many times. _you need a master_

Ren thought he was talking to Hux then.

He was talking to himself.

There are a lot of things Ren cannot do. Cannot be. He’s too contradictory. He is, Hux knows, beginning to understand that now.

“I can’t,” Ren bites out, the last of his pride sold and laid bare, “plan things. I don’t have that kind of mind. Snoke was right about that.”

Snoke is right about a lot of things. Hux doesn’t need to say that aloud. His eyes slide shut, but he sits inside of Ren’s mind. It’s better there even so full of contradictions. It is incomplete. He, in this moment, needs Hux there.

So Hux can’t die yet. Unfortunately.

“A plan,” Hux murmurs.

“Not now,” Meera snaps, harsher than Hux and, apparently, Ren have ever heard him; his face is a stormy landscape. “Neither of you are in any condition to do whatever it is you’re going to come up with. Not,” and it’s so angry, fragrant and bitter; it’s blinding, “that either of you will listen.”

Meera is not an old man, but the events of the past eight months have made him age years. It is a testament to how much Ren is weakened that he doesn’t lash out and choke Meera for his outburst. Not that Hux would let him.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Hux says, and his voice is strange; there’s a rushing sensation in his ears. “I will consider a rest. Who currently has the conn?”

“Colonel Delika,” Meera answers, his shoulders dropping slightly; his hands remain fists on his scanner.

“Beta shift,” Hux murmurs, reaching up with his free hand and rubbing his left ear; he is careful not to jostle the IV line. “I need a report. Where we are. What is happening. And I…”

Hux feels himself flagging. It’s alarmingly fast. The rushing noise in his ears makes him feel dizzy. Ren catches that thought and helps him lie back down. Hux blinks up at Ren. Meera and his scanner. The familiar, soothing ceiling.

He’s so tired.

“Contact the _Minotaur_ ,” he says as well as screams at Ren through the void as consciousness slowly takes its leave of him again. “Phasma. Tell the General I’d like the Captain back.”

 

The rest of the First Order knows nothing of what has occurred.

Hux must take advantage of that. Using Ren’s mind as an anchor as poor and unstable as it is, he moves through the minds of the political class on Coruscant. Some suspect something has happened; it has been eight Imperial days of silence from Snoke’s voice. Most, however, have no idea. They continue their petty rivalries and even pettier desires. Trying to use the growing void to change. To grow.

_you can fight and die when you’re grown_

“Hux,” Ren says, soft and warm against his ear. “Wake up. We are to rendezvous with the _Minotaur_ in an hour.”

Hux is weak. Disgustingly so. Ren has to help him sit up as a medical droid brings a foil packet of liquid emergency nutrients. Hux drinks it with the help of the droid holding it and Ren holding Hux upright against his good side. 

“A shot of adrenaline,” Ren suggests to Meera when the doctor emerges from his office.

“No,” Meera snaps, scanner pointed straight at Hux’s head. “His heart might burst.”

“Pain suppressants,” Hux mutters, pushing both the droid and Ren away. “And another liquid ration.”

“Is that an order?” Meera snarls, knuckles white on the scanner.

It doesn’t need to be. Hux is commander of the _Finalizer_. He ranks higher than anyone else in the First Order. Beyond Snoke now, if he is able to complete this coup d’état. There is no point to a leader who cannot function. If it won’t kill him, then it must be done. He must function, even if it isn’t in his best interest. A tool is only useful until it’s not.

The first pain suppressant takes enough of the edge off the physical pain, and the second nutrient foil helps to clear Hux’s head enough to think with a functional margin of clarity. Ren and Meera help him to dress as a medical droid injects him with second dose of pain suppressant to make sure its effects last more than a few minutes. There are no more secrets. Hux’s tolerance of such effects cannot come from anything other than long-term abuse.

Ren keeps a hand on his right elbow even after they get to the bridge. It would be pointless to shake him off; Hux is unstable on his feet at best. He only removes his hand once Hux has seated himself at the command console, Colonel Orovax listening off the _Finalizer_ ’s damage. She stares at him openly as do most of the crew, amazement, incomprehension, and constant, conflicted fear rolling off of all corners.

They know exactly what he is now. Yet, for whatever reason, like Captain Fon’s misplaced loyalty, Orovax’s consciously masochistic admiration, and Ren’s resentful respect, they still chose to follow him into his lunacy. Into a chance for greater power. Into the Dark of the void.

“Damage is minimal,” Orovax summarises after reassuring Hux that there is no structural damage to the engines and, aside from bruising, there were no crew casualties, “all things considered.”

“The _Minotaur_ is hailing us,” Fon calls.

It’s somewhat unnecessary as the _Minotaur_ has just dropped out of hyperspace barely ten leagues away from where the _Finalizer_ is in orbit around Ren’s birth planet. It means that Faro herself is probably at the navigation controls. It’s her favourite trick to drop her rust-bucket of a battleship out of hyperspace primed for the element of surprise. 

“General,” Hux says as Faro’s sharp-toothed grin appears on the comm, “I’m not impressed.”

She laughs at him. Captain Phasma moves into view, fully dressed in the armour of her station. No visible evidence of her ordeals aside, but there is a faint physical ache originating from her knees that Hux can feel. She won’t be leading ground assaults from the field anymore. It would be too reckless.

“You’ve been looking for your stormtrooper,” Faro says, her face split by her grin.

“I understand,” Hux starts, addressing Phasma because Faro’s comment does not warrant response, “that you have been assigned to occupational rehabilitation the _Minotaur_. I have requested, however, that you return to your previous position upon the _Finalizer_ ahead of schedule.”

“It is an order,” Faro murmurs, eyes glittering with mirth.

“I accept,” Phasma says, no doubt in her tone, thoughts, or feelings. 

A transport is arranged. Phasma steps off-screen and off of the _Minotaur_ ’s bridge to take it to the _Finalizer_. Hux sends Ren to the bay to play herald. It leaves Faro and Hux alone with their alpha crews. It’s like when Starkiller Base was being built and they all used to play games over the network to stave off boredom in the void of space.

“Are you still conquering planets?” Hux asks, although he already knows. 

Faro’s lips curl. “I’m working on some old Imperial space,” she says, and there’s that familiar heady lust and greed floating through her at the prospect of what else she can add to her nest. “We’d just finished subduing Ryloth when you called.”

Ryloth. That cursed, sickly planet that Rigger died over. That Hux, even now, can barely think about. Faro has taken it and holds it under her and ostensibly the First Order’s control.

Hux’s hands tighten on the arms of the command chair.

The void widens. 

“Are you going to raze it?”

It makes Faro clap her hands with glee. “Oh, how I missed you and your bloodlust!” she cackles before settling back and waving her hands lazily, a knowing glint in her eyes. “Who knows, who knows? The population is certainly rebellious, but there’s been no orders of late.”

Hux doesn’t say anything. He can feel the eyes of his crew on him, their ears completely focused on the conversation. They feel and think a great many things. But they do not speak. Do not betray. It is not, however, obedience that holds them back. 

It’s Hux. 

Something of this realisation must show on his face because, back on the _Minotaur_ , Faro throws back her head and laughs.

 

The _Minotaur_ jumps back into hyperspace at the end of alpha shift. The only part of that ship that isn’t perpetually falling apart is its engines. Back when Hux served on it, he’d been in charge of maintaining them. It was not a difficult job. Hux has always been highly competent in engineering, and both Nanarat and Faro hadn’t cared so long as the engines did what they wanted them to do. In Faro’s case, they needed to be able to make abrupt jumps in and out of hyperspace. When Hux received the _Finalizer_ , he’d made sure the engines could handle such feats as well. He’d trained all of the on-board navigators to handle such a maneuverer. 

Hux understands now that they wouldn’t have escaped Snoke if not for that specific capability. He tells Phasma of all of this, sitting again on what has definitely become his cot in medical. She sits on the vacant cot to his left in her armour but her helmet on her knees. Ren sits at the foot of Hux’s cot. Slouched, he looks like one of the practice targets that Hux was taught to shoot at the Academy. Ren glances at him at that thought but doesn’t say anything.

“I wish I’d been there,” Phasma says when Hux finishes. “Seven months apart: I’ve missed so many beautiful things.”

Hux throws the empty nutrient foil at her. She catches it before it hits her face, eyes and mouth and mind sparkling with good humour. Ren frowns at them both. He doesn’t understand the joke. To him, this is a serious situation. He doesn’t understand that Hux doesn’t care. He doesn’t understand a lot of things. 

Phasma drums the blunt of her nails on the dome of her helmet. “The only thing I’m curious about is why did you choose to hide in the Yavin system?” 

“Instinct,” Hux says as he accepts another nutrient foil from Meera.

“I was born here,” Ren says just before emergency systems blare bright and loud.

Meera stabs Hux with another dose of pain suppressant without needing to be asked. Phamsa puts her helmet back on as Hux and Ren both scramble off the bed. A medical droid does up Hux’s boots as Ren helps him shove on his greatcoat. The three of them hurry out of medical, Ren inexplicably grabbing that gigantic black cloak as they go. 

He has, Hux can’t help but think as he clutches the wound in his left side to make sure it doesn’t accidentally reopen, a bad feeling about this. 

“We’re being hailed,” Colonel Delika says as they appear on the bridge.

It’s an unnecessary announcement. Ren’s mental scream of _FATHER’S SHIP_ informs Hux better than anything else that the _Millenium Falcon_ is approaching in the viewport. Hux leaves him frozen in the west entrance, reaching out for Phasma to make sure he gets to the command console and chair. He runs his hands over his face. Through his hair. He has so much pain suppressant in his bloodstream that he can barely feel his own flesh.

The galaxy screams.

“Open communications.”

The holoscreen crackles on. There are familiar faces from Ren’s memory. Chewbacca, who held Ren when he was afraid of storms and shot him in the side. Poe Dameron, ace pilot of the Resistance and former prisoner of the First Order. Rey, scavenger, Force-sensitive, rejecter of Ren’s help. FN-2187, traitor of stormtroopers and thorn in Ren’s side. They’re all thorns in Ren’s side. They should have been the arrow that Chewbacca put there. 

At his right, Phasma burns with resentment. Golden, shining anger. They threatened her, humiliated her, threw her down a trash compactor. 

Hux wraps himself in their thoughts and feelings. His lunacy. He hasn’t been this high in months. He forgot how wonderful it is not to feel anything of himself.

“Greetings, _Millennium Falcon_. You have reached the _Finalizer_.”

“General Hux,” Poe Dameron bites out. “So you’re why the _Minotaur_ was in this system.”

Hux smiles. It seems that Faro’s reputation as little more than a space pirate precedes her. The _Minotaur_ was what had given them away. It can’t be helped, Hux supposes. It would have happened soon enough when Snoke appears. He’s coming ever closer, hurdling through the void towards Ren’s undeniable Light. 

“You must have been very close by,” Hux says as Ren comes up to stand at his left, the cloak dragging at his side, “to come so quickly.”

Chewbacca and Dameron exchange looks. FN-2187 and Rey both glance at Ren before returning their attention to Hux. FN-2187 is thinking about how different everyone looks. Rey –

There is a brushing feeling over Hux’s mind. 

_get out of my head_

She jumps. Eyes going impossibly wide. Everyone on her side of the comm look at her in surprise. Hux feels his lips stretch. His teeth exposed. 

“You’re the one,” she says, and there’s terror and awe and sick understanding in both her voice and her mind. “You collapsed something, didn’t you?”

Collapsed. Drowned. Same thing. It’s all instinct.

“The Supreme Leader’s planet.”

Silence. Everyone is staring at him. Hux could catalogue all of their thoughts and feelings, but he doesn’t need to. They flow through him. A conduit, Ren has always thought. That is what Hux really is in his so-called Force.

“Wait,” Dameron says, leaning forward and placing his hands on the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s console. “Let me get this straight. You’re Force-sensitive, too?”

Hux laughs. It’s a hysterical, boundless noise. It is ugly and dark and all the bad taste that he was always attributed with from his Academy days until now. He has to hold together his own side as he tilts forward. Tears of mirth prick at the edges of his vision. Phasma and Ren both reach out. Holding his shoulders. Supporting him.

“I don’t believe in that crock,” Hux wheezes out, taking the end of the cloak that Ren holds out and wiping his eyes on it. “And if that’s what you care about –”

“Of course we care about the giant, malevolent presence that’s flying this way,” Rey says; her hands have turned to fists at her sides. “It started coming this way when the _Minotaur_ appeared. Does that mean your ‘Supreme Leader’ is –”

“You should,” Ren says as Hux sits back up, letting go of the cloak, “have let me train you. We could have prevented this. We could have –”

_Ren_

He freezes. A seizing of muscles that leaves him rocking on his heels. The cloak falls out of his hands, pooling on the floor. Hux doesn’t need to look at him. Rey opens her mouth. Hux snorts. The sudden surge of fear from all sides is making him feel dizzy. Totally high. 

“Don’t be so arrogant,” he says, singsongs; Phasma’s hand is a grounding weight. “That is not your role. Snoke is—what do you call it—‘a creature of the Dark’. You have no chance against something like that, Lord Knight of Ren.”

Because, for all his titles, Ren is weak. Not because he lacks power but because he believes himself to be. His petty attempts to please Snoke made him into a dog. Rabid and jagged-toothed. A dog cannot train. It can only fight for dominance or be dominated. A tool in someone else’s design. Hux is no architect, but he did steal Ren. He’s stolen Phasma. He’s stolen the _Finalizer_. 

They are not his to keep, but they depend on him to keep them alive if not safe. They are all tools. Weapons. Hux is simply the most powerful of them all.

He must fight. 

“Lord Ren,” Hux says. “Ready a transport down to the planet.” 

 

“There’s an old base,” Dameron had explained, his entire being pained after a wasted hour of deliberation in which Hux had to forcefully threaten them with exposing that there is a major Resistance base in the Yavin moon system to the rest of the First Order, “down on this moon. It hasn’t been used in decades, but it should still be functional.”

The base is a dense metal thing imbedded into the even denser rock. It’s surrounded by the forests that populate the land of the moon, located on the opposite side upon which the _Finalizer_ has crash-landed briefly only a handful of shifts ago. Meera had topped Hux up on pain suppressants before he boarded the transport, his entire body as tense as his thoughts and feelings.

“I won’t do this again,” Meera said as Hux rolls his head on his neck, the _Finalizer_ spinning in his brain. 

“If we fail, you won’t have to do anything,” Hux pointed out because he’s completely high and living inside of everyone else’s minds.

Something flashed in Meera’s eyes. His hands twitched. He didn’t punch Hux or try to grab him, but it was a near thing. Phasma stood next to him, her helmeted head turned to Meera. If he so much as breathed wrong, she would take him out. She was staying back because of her knees and to make sure there would be no repeat of FN-2187’s treachery. 

The doctor sucked in one breath. Blew it out. Sucked in another. Captain Fon flashed the blue signal that the transport was ready to depart.

“Why am I still surprised,” Meera muttered, and there was something in him, that bitter, wavering thing that Hux has never been able to identify. “Don’t die, you stupid boy.”

Hux honestly has no idea what to think of that. Meera’s words and that bitter wavering feeling are what occupies him on the way down to Yavin 1. He turns them over, uncertain of what he has been offered. For it was an offering, thrown up and directed towards Hux completely and utterly. Like Rigger’s friendship. Like Phasma’s admiration. Like Ren’s presence at his side as they move into the control room with Dameron, Rey, and FN-2187.

_here_

“We’ll head him off with the Millennium Falcon,” Rey suggests, Dameron and FN-2187 framing her right and left. “Are you sure Snoke is alone?”

Ren glances at Hux, who sits in the rusted command chair at the primitive but functional console. Hux looks up at the ceiling. Feels the void stretching, Ren jogging after in his mind.

“Snoke and his droids,” Ren confirms from what he picks up from inside of Hux’s head. “I can deal with the droids once we get on the ship. I no longer have a lightsaber –”

“So I’ll have to hold him off,” Rey nods, even as FN-2187 reaches out and squeezes her hand. “I don’t know how long –”

“We need him to be in the gravitational pull of this moon,” Ren says, and he reaches out and places his fingers on the back of Hux’s head; guides his gaze back from the ceiling, from the void. “The General is untrained –”

Hux shakes his head. Ren takes his hand away. The room, world, galaxy swims in and out of focus. Drowning. A deep, bottomless drain.

“This is insane,” he says because it’s true; he is a lunatic. “Worlds will bleed.”

Silence. Verbally but certainly not mentally or emotionally. It wavers like that strange bitter thing Meera offered. Outside, on this forest world, a storm is rumbling. Rain pelts down, fat droplets pinging off the metal. It is so loud that it sounds like stones. He’d traded them for a fish to eat with Rigger on Naboo thirteen years gone. 

There is something trying to crawl out of Hux’s chest. Throat. It makes his heart pound. It drains all the blood.

Phasma loves him when he’s covered in blood.

“Pilot,” and Hux has to know, wants to hear the words aloud rather than plucking the answer out of Dameron’s head, “were you involved in a skirmish over Ryloth six years ago?”

The room has gone very still. Ren’s hand rests on the small of Hux’s back beneath the cloak he bundled Hux in when they disembarked the transport in the rain. FN-2187 and Rey look at Dameron, who stares at Hux. Clear, bright, extraordinarily intelligent eyes. Hux could make them melt into his skull.

 _Hux_ Ren whispers.

“No,” Dameron says, and it is true; his eyes and his mind do not flicker even as his eyebrows furrow in confusion at the sudden change in topic. “But I’ve heard of it. It was a scandal. A hospital transport was hit. It was mistaken for reinforcements. Why?”

Hux does not move. Does not ask. Cannot. He has never been able to look at the details. Unlike everything and everyone else in his life, Hux put his heart into Rigger. Losing him tore something open so wide that Hux cannot bring himself close to it again without dying all over again. He doesn’t know if Rigger died on the transport, if he’d been shot down defending it; if he’d died immediately, if he’d died prolonged and in pain. Hux –

“You lost someone,” Rey says, very knowing, very softly.

Ren’s fingertips press. Hard points of pressure. Blunt nails. 

_Hux_

Somewhere, someone is screaming.

“The pilots involved were discharged from the Resistance,” Dameron says, and his eyes flicker with a mixture of regret, resentment, and reticence. “That sort of thing, the slaughter of innocents: it’s unforgiveable.”

The void widens.

There is a spike of anger in Ren. Bright red and acrid. His fingers clench in the fabric over Hux’s spine. Holding him back. Together. It reminds Hux that he stole Ren. That Ren’s anger is for Hux. It is his to use as he sees fit.

It makes Hux smile. Reach out. Up. He brushes his fingers over Ren’s face. Against his forehead. The bridge of his nose. The blunt of his own nails over the snarls of the scar. Ren leans into the touch. Accepting the dominance. 

Rey, FN-2187, and Dameron stare.

_I’m here_

Ren’s emotions boil. Red and glowing and bright. Hux’s fingers slip down over his cheek. His jaw. He rests his hand against the soft, hot skin where Ren’s jaw meets his neck. Ren doesn’t protest. He encourages. He tilts his head slightly so that Hux’s hand can fit. It’s terribly intimate, Hux can’t help but think. It’s insane. 

Snoke thought he could own Ren.

Hux is not so arrogant.

“Everyone is part of a greater design.” 

He turns Ren’s chin. Ren looks down at him. Fire in his eyes reflecting envy, frustration, trust, and respect. Hux feels something uncurling. Untangling. The void gapes, but Ren feels warm. It eases the pain of his partially healed side. Or perhaps Ren’s side. Hux has lived for so many months inside of Ren’s head he’s begun to get mixed up. He cannot help himself. He is a lunatic.

Ren shines so very brilliantly with the Light. 

“Born,” Hux whispers, roars, dares, “to fight and die when we are grown.”

 

There isn’t very much time. Snoke’s ship is fast approaching. The old computers in this long abandoned base don’t register it, but it’s impossible for Hux, Ren, or Rey to miss. Snoke’s rage plunders everything in its path, a lance hurled across the galaxy. Phasma and Orovax have followed Hux’s last orders before departing with Ren and moved the _Finalizer_ into orbit around Yavin 2, out of Snoke’s immediate range. Fon remains with the transport ship in orbit around Yavin 1. Awaiting orders to retrieve Hux and Ren. His thought and emotions run together, stubbornly set on disobeying any order to retreat without them.

Hux won’t make him. If Fon is set on dying, then it is his choice. He is grown.

“How far away is Snoke?” 

Hux blinks. Turns in the control chair. Dameron and Rey stand in the doorway of the old control room. Hux can feel Ren prowling around the borders of the base, FN-2187 following with trepidation. Hux is starting to grow tired again. He needs to eat. Needs to drink. Wants Phasma here with him even though she is needed on the _Finalizer_. Wants his pills or even that Sith remedy. He only has enough pain suppressants on him to reduce physical pain in emergency. The entire situation is an emergency.

It’s all or nothing. It always has been.

“About twelve hours,” Hux says, and it’s extremely difficult to remember if this is his physical voice or not. 

Rey nods. She and Dameron exchange looks. Discomfort. Distrust. Resentment. Resignation. It’s Rey who looks back to Hux first. She is full of heat, a passionate feeling like the planet she spent most of her life on. Struggling to grow. Struggling to not die.

It’s like looking at the exact opposite of himself. 

“It’s not Snoke we should fear,” she says, not stepping forward but not stepping back. “It’s you.”

Hux smiles. He’s doing that a lot lately. He doesn’t remember if he used to smile a lot before. If he ever had a reason aside from trying to hide his lunacy. Maybe with Rigger, back when they were young and naïve and stealing extra dessert portions from the Academy kitchens. He knows that his smile is different now. It would be impossible for it not to be. Rigger is dead. 

“We have a common enemy,” he murmurs.

Although they don’t physically move, both Rey and Dameron recoil mentally in disgust. Hux feels his smile twisting. It’s beautiful. They’re both so bright and passionate, so full of Light like Ren. It makes sense; they are from the same stock. He wonders as they exchange glances again if they are aware of FN-2187. He isn’t like them. He may have stolen something for himself, placed himself in another skin, but so has Hux. He and Hux are the same. A tool. A weapon. Born to fight and die when they are grown.

“If we win –” Rey starts.

“When we win,” Dameron says; Rey reaches out and placing her hand on his shoulder, “we aren’t going to forgive you. We are going to bring you to justice.”

The void ripples. Pulses. Expands.

It makes Hux laugh. It makes Ren, halfway through climbing over a crest of rocks, start. FN-2187 runs into his back. It makes Hux laugh harder. Fingers curling over his bad side. Making folds in the cloak he’s wrapped in to keep warm in Ren’s absence. His hair, forever unstyled these long days and nights, falls into his eyes. Over his cheeks. 

“Justice,” Hux wheezes, and he grins with all the will his lunacy lends him, a thousand black holes open in his mind. “I do not care. You are not my crew. Do as you please.”

Rigger is not here. Hux’s anchor is long gone. He won’t do that to Phasma, no matter how much he lives inside of her head. Ren is not his to keep even though he invites Hux in. The _Finalizer_ has its orders and Phasma and Orovax will follow them without hesitation. His crew will escape without or without him.

Hux is a killer. An executioner. A weapon that was honed.

Hux is ready to die. 

Rey’s eyes flicker. She can hear him. She is unsettled by him. Not so much by who is his but rightfully by what he is. She doesn’t recoil, nor does she admire. She watches, an intense, wary thing. It reminds Hux of how Ren once believed he was. But Ren is weak, and Hux is no master. Rey knows this without even having to breach either of their minds.

Dameron glances between her and Hux, his lips a thin line. He cannot join them in this end of the lunacy.

“You care about them,” Rey says, very softly, unnerved and unhappy.

Hux turns away. Back to face the console. He runs his fingers over the display. He spent his entire life preparing for this. 

He will fight and he will die.

That is what Nell promised when he was four.

“If you get in their way,” Hux murmurs, tracing the buttons on the scanner’s controls, the knobs to launch ships that no longer exist on the abandoned base, “I’ll destroy everything.”

Rey and Dameron don’t say anything. They don’t need to. 

Their terror screams.

 

Snoke is less an hour away. Ren and Rey are ready to board the fighter to intercept it. Dameron and FN-2187 linger around her, their hands clasped together. Ren stands in front of Hux. Fixes the ridiculous cloak around his shoulders. The Lord Knight of Ren, torn between his masters.

“I am a general,” Hux points out, aloud because Ren is burning, his mind rippling with anger and Light. “Not some mythical ‘master’.” 

“You suit this,” Ren says, deliberately resisting Hux as he soothes the fabric over Hux’s upper arms. “My grandfather’s cloak.”

A dead, misguided man’s clothes. Hux hears himself laugh. Ren cups his elbows, mismatched visage pulled by his lips and teeth. Not a smile. Not a grimace. Something feral. Furious. So, so alive.

“You’re so beautiful,” Ren whispers, “covered in blood.”

The kiss is unexpected. It makes Hux part his lips. Ren dives forward, tightening his hold, barrelling fast and deep into the void. Into the Dark. Into the lunacy, the gift, the incomprehensible vastness that Hux has held since he was born. Ren is screaming, roaring, wailing:

_let me in_

Hux leans back against the wall. He reaches up. Hands pressing against Ren’s sides. Over the bowcaster wound and ribs. Hux presses down, curling his fingers in the regulation blacks. No armour. Ren isn’t strong enough to carry any and still have full function. He was asleep for too long. He’s dull. Weak. But more useful alive than dead.

_I’m here_

Ren makes a noise. He shifts. Lowering himself slightly as he adjusts the kiss, trying to go deeper than he already is. Hux can see Rey, Dameron, and FN-2187 watching. It stirs something. Hux feels his eyes fall to half-mast. A grieving. 

Hux shuts his eyes. A howling.

Ren is so bright in the void. 

When they pull apart, it is not the same. There is something there that wasn’t before. Hux doesn’t have time to examine it. Ren holds Hux’s elbows still. Hux’s hands are still clasped against Ren’s sides. They are still being watched. Snoke is coming ever close in the sky. 

“Go,” Hux says.

 _don’t die_ he commands.

“Yes,” Ren says.

 _I won’t_ he promises.

Hux lets him go.

 

**Finn.**

The sky is on fire.

Finn and Poe stand next to each other. Look up as Snoke’s massive ship blots out the sky. Fire hits the atmosphere in the form of parts falling off of it. Behind them, General Hux sits on the steps of the old base. Finn avoids looking at him. The last time he did, the General smiled. It was no different from the thousands of prop speeches Finn had spent years listening to. It had made that feeling blossom in the back of Finn’s brain.

Instead, it’s Poe who turns away from the sky at regular intervals, his hands clenching at his sides each time. 

“How are they doing?” he asks each time.

“They’re still alive,” the General answers every time.

And then, as with all things, something changes. The massive ship itself rocks. It begins to tilt, listing on its side. It makes both Poe and Finn wince, even though that must mean that Rey and Ren have boarded. That they’re somehow managing to get to Snoke. Behind them, there’s a dark, humourless laugh. The sound of gravel crunching beneath boot heels.

"Trooper."

It's been seven months since someone called Finn that. But there was a lifetime before that. Finn's head whips around.

"General," he says. 

He can feel his body betraying him. Straightening. Locking up. Trying to force him to salute. Poe grabs his elbow. Helps him stop. The General does not look at him. Does not look at Poe. He strides past in that ridiculous black cloak that Kylo Ren dressed and kissed him in before he and Rey left. The General moves forward. Four steps. Five. He stops where the gravel meets grass, looking out and up into the sky. To the ship. Towards Snoke. 

Rey is up there. So is Kylo Ren. 

The fate of the galaxy suspended a burning sky.

The General straightens. The excess fabric of the cloak pools around his feet. A black hole, Finn absurdly thinks.

"Trooper," the General says again; Poe's hand tightens on Finn's elbow. "Secure yourself."

There was a lifetime that bore instincts. Finn doesn’t have to think. He slams himself and Poe down against the ground. Security for a crash landing.

The General raises his hands.

For the rest of his life, Finn is unable to adequately describe what happens next.

There is the sensation of tearing. Of coming together. Of something incomprehensible opening. Closing. The entire planet, for a long, indeterminate moment, becomes both massive and immaterial. The General, swallowed in that bizarre cloak, matters the most and the least. An existence and an ending all at once.

The only concrete thing is a woman's voice, tired and sad, whispering straight into Finn's head:

_you can fight and die when you're grown_

The sky, on fire and full of death, begins to collapse.

 

**Hux.**

There is a disturbance in the Force.

A hole.

Hux wraps himself in it. In the Dark. Swallows it. Becomes it. 

This is what he was born for. The tool that was honed. A weapon, a dream, a desire, a nightmare. 

He is, above all else, a creature of instinct. 

He has grown.

He can die.

The void opens wide. 

Hux closes his eyes. 

_yes_

He welcomes the end with open arms.

 

**The aftermath:**

Rey and Kylo Ren emerge from the wreckage. Strangely unscathed from the crashed ship, they drag Snoke's disintegrating, mutilated body behind them. Around them, satellite and spaceship debris continue to fall from the sky, cratering with hollow thuds and igniting flames amongst the forest. Rey drops her hold on Snoke’s body as Finn and Poe stagger to their feet and rush towards her. Kylo finishes dragging the body into the ruined courtyard, his head whipping back and forth. 

"Hux!" he screams.

Hux stands still in the door. Kylo drops his hold on the body. Lets his former master splatter on the ruined ground. Uncaring. Unfettered. 

Free.

Kylo doesn’t care. 

He didn’t want freedom. He never did. Snoke was right about that, too.

More than anything, Kylo wanted somewhere to belong.

“Hux!”

Kylo hurries to Hux. He drops to his knees on the tangled hem of the gigantic Sith cloak. Hux does not look at him. His hands are still upraised. Kylo kneels. Reaches.

"Hux," he says, softer but a thousand times louder; he grips Hux's wrists, forces his hands to lower; he shakes them once, twice. "Stop. Stop. Stop, you _bastard_ , don’t you dare leave me –"

 

Someone is calling.

Nell is gone. His father floats forever in space. Rigger is long dead over Ryloth. Phasma is safe on the _Finalizer_ in command of the troops. The _Finalizer_ under Orovax is preparing to leave Yavin 2 for Coruscant. Fon hovers above, the transport wobbling stubbornly wobbling in orbit around Yavin 1 as it begins to destabilise. Snoke is dead. 

Hux is in the void. He can finally die.

But someone is calling. Here and now. 

_don’t you dare leave me_ the voice screams. 

It is selfish. Frightened. Angry. That last part is familiar. It makes Hux, despite himself, look up. Around. The void is pitch black. The Dark that he was made for. That he was born from. There should be no way for sound to carry here.

Only –

_bleeding bantha shit_

There is a flicker. Anger. The faint impression of red.

Hux looks at it. How it wavers in the Dark. Surviving in the void.

Ren's Light.

It’s so full of warmth. Of thoughts and emotions, dreams and desires. It is so very alive. 

Ren’s Light is the most beautiful thing in the galaxy.

Hux is a creature of the Dark. He never had room for the Light.

This is his favourite mistake.

 

Rey frowns.

"What do you mean you're leaving?"

Kylo doesn't respond immediately. He adjusts his hold on the General, who hangs in a slack piggyback over Kylo’s back. The General is unconscious but not quite asleep. His body is completely exhausted, but she can feel how hard Kylo is pulling on the General’s Force presence. Making him pay attention. Begging him not to slip away. 

"Because I am," Ren says simply, lips curling in a mockery of contempt even as she listens to him whispering _please don’t sleep not now not yet you can’t leave me_ against the General’s Force presence; Ren glares at her, his hold on the General tightening. "I must return the General to his ship.” 

Rey steps forward. Kylo starts to flinch back, but the General’s weight on his back nearly makes him overbalance. She stops a pace from him. Hands fisting at her side.

“Snoke is dead,” she says; she sees the way Kylo’s eyes immediately flick to the disgusting lump of body to mentally reassure himself. “You don’t need to obey him anymore.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Kylo takes two steps back. It jostles the General. Wakes him enough that the vast, empty press of his Force presence washes over Kylo, then Rey. Slowly back out over the field. It makes Rey’s stomach turn, and she can feel how it instinctively unsettles Finn and Poe. Kylo, however, draws strength. He tightens his hold on Hux. Shuts himself further to Rey.

“No,” Kylo says, soft and harsh and very angry. “This is not about Snoke. The Resistance –”

 _Ren_ Hux's voice murmurs; his Force presence is faint and tired and all the more dangerous for it. _my crew_

Ren winces. "Hux –" he starts aloud.

 _my ship_

The General’s Force presence, that terrible Dark thing, blooms.

Rey feels the way both Poe and Finn tense up. They might not be Force-sensitive, but the threatening change in atmosphere is clear. Kylo is frozen, his eyes on a point somewhere beyond Rey’s head.

 _Hux_

It is a whisper. Undoubtedly weak. It’s a wavering attempt at soothing, an imitation from a far away memory. Of General Organa, years before Rey ever knew her, soothing Ben, who was afraid of storms. Of the Dark.

 _we aren’t going to abandon the_ Finalizer _please, I promise –_

Hux’s Force presence presses down. Rey throws her hands up. Over her head. It’s like a thousand fingers scuffling over her brain. Behind her, she hears Poe choke, memories of his torture at the hands of Kylo resurfacing. Finn wavers, unmoored suddenly as the faint bond between him and the General twangs. Across from her, Kylo curls. Eyes snapping shut. Jaw clenched so hard his teeth squeak. 

He doesn’t let go of the General.

“Please!” he screams, aloud and into the Force; in that moment he’s more terrified than he ever was when they were fighting Snoke. “I’m not lying! I promise! I _promise_! You are not going to lose anything else!”

The pressing stops. The General’s presence remains, a dense, Dark, tangible thing, but it’s not threatening anymore. It reminds Rey absurdly of a blanket. Or the bizarre cloak that covers Hux and Kylo both. Hux shifts under it. Against Kylo’s back. He reaches up like he’s moving through water. Tugs clumsily on Kylo’s hair. It isn’t hard. It’s tired. Almost gentle.

Kylo’s eyes don’t leave Rey, but the terror winks out. Something softens. Despite himself. Because of himself.

Rey suddenly understands.

“Lord Ren,” the General murmurs.

“Yes,” Ren says, soft and soothing in all the ways he’d failed earlier to be comforting. “Yes, just a moment. You’re heavy.”

The Dark slips back. Like drawing back a blanket. The General is falling asleep. Kylo stares for a long moment at Rey. At Finn and Poe. At the corpse of his master. The ruins of the planet, which is cracked and on fire.

“We’re going,” Kylo says, his arms around the General whose fingers are still tangled in his hair.

 _I’ll destroy everything_ the General promises _if you follow_

There is no need to specify what the General would destroy. Anything. Everything. Rey nods. There is no doubt. Kylo turns. He walks away, slowly but steadily, a mass of black highlighted by bits of dark metal and the General’s hair. Finn and Poe approach, framing Rey’s back as Kylo Ren and General Hux disappear into the forest. Into the fire. Back to the ship that they’ve chosen over the galaxy itself.

“We’re just letting them go.”

Rey reaches out. Finds Poe’s hands. Finn rests his forehead against the crown of Rey’s head. 

The ground begins to buckle.

Rey breathes in deep. 

“Now’s not the time,” she says, turning back towards where they’d landed in what seems like a long time ago. “Whatever the General did: it’s destabilised the moon’s core.”

 

_Ren_

Kylo shifts. Looks away from his grandfather’s mask to the bed where he’d deposited Hux once the _Finalizer_ was back in hyperspace. Hux only has one eye open. He’s still dressed in the clothing they went down to Yavin 1 in. Kylo covered him with the cloak. Hux hadn’t protested. He isn’t entirely sure if Hux has enough energy to move. Not after what he did to Yavin 1.

The moon no longer exists. It’s in fragments according to reports. Slowly falling down a strange, isolated black hole. 

_let Phasma in_

Kylo blinks. Stands up and goes to the door panel. Phasma is on the other side. Kylo opens the door. The two of them stare at each other for a long, awkward moment. 

“Captain,” Hux says, and his voice is raspy as if from long disuse. “Let her in, Lord Ren.”

Kylo steps to the side. Phasma steps around him. The door slides shut as Phasma reaches up and takes off her helmet. She looks down at Hux on the bed. 

“We will be converging with the _Minotaur_ in orbit around Coruscant in just under forty hours.”

Hux shifts. It’s obviously a great effort. Kylo starts to move towards him. Phasma glances at him. It stops Kylo. Her gaze is cold. Suspicious. Even after everything. Because of everything. Hux sits up, his head lolling forward. He watches them both through his bangs. 

“Just the _Minotaur_.”

It is not a question. It is the only battleship that Hux wants in orbit around the First Order’s main political foothold when they arrive. Kylo’s hands curl into fists. Phasma smiles. All teeth.

“As of last report, yes,” Phasma says, a cruel sort of humour to her tone. “News of Snoke’s demise has spread. There will be more.”

There’s a pressing. The memory of Nell, promising Bren a life of battle and death. The memory of Rigger and his desire to see Hux rule. The memory of Starkiller’s glory, green and cold, death across the sky.

 _architecture_ Hux mutters _tools gift curse death life lunacy Force whatever I don’t care so long as I can keep Phasma Ren my ship my crew so long so long so long keep protect mine mine_

Kylo breathes in. He steps forward. Kneels. Hux looks at him through his hair. It’s that dull look that means Hux is unable to shut off his awareness of everything. 

“General,” Phasma says.

Ren reaches out. Tucks his fingers in Hux’s hair. Hux stares at them both. Pupils wide. 

_I’m here_

Hux smiles. All teeth. A creature of instinct. So full of the Dark.

The void opens. 

 

The galaxy screams.

“Yes.” 

Hux says. Thinks. Feels. Roars. 

Hux is a tool. A piece in the architecture made by architects. He’s moved as he was requested. As he knew he should. This is his purpose. 

He was born to rule. To fight and to die when he is grown.

Hux lifts his hands. His right to Phasma. His left to Ren. They reach. Grasp his wrists so that he can curl his fingers around theirs. Ren smiles, the scar twisting. Phasma’s lips quirk, eyes glinting.

They are so full of Light.

This is his favourite mistake. These are things he should not want. He is a creature of the Dark. He should not be letting in the Light. 

Hux has never believed in such things.

Hux does not care.

He squeezes their wrists. Their flesh and bones. Full blood and life, thoughts and feelings, dreams and desires. Hux is just a tool. More useful alive than dead.

He was born to rule the galaxy.

_my friends_

He will rule for it them.


End file.
